A man who calmly lit up a cigarette and refused to hand over his phone during an armed robbery last week said he wouldn’t do anything differently if faced with the situation again.
The incident occurred on Wednesday, August 28, in a St Louis bar, where a gunman walked in and tried to rob the place.
One gentleman at the counter, however, had other ideas. And instead of complying with the gunman’s request of laying on the ground and handing over his cellphone, the customer casually lit up a cigarette and reportedly said: ‘Go ahead. Shoot me. I don’t give a fuck.’
You can watch the footage here:
Now, the calm customer has been revealed to be Tony Tovar, who said he would ‘absolutely not’ do anything different if it happened again – though he doesn’t recommend anyone else trying to do the same.
Speaking to NBC New York, Tovar said the robber was ‘another punk trying to pull a punk move’, and that he ‘just wanted drug money’.
Tony said:
I’m so tired of people in South City thinking they can control people because they want to muscle their way in with firearms or bad attitudes or, y’know, some kind of aggression.
Speaking about how he managed to remain so calm while the robber pointed a gun at him, Tony said:
I just had a really good feeling that he wasn’t out to harm anybody, he just wanted drug money, but it’s probably not in your best interest – if they have a loaded firearm – I wouldn’t suggest [refusing to cooperate] to just anybody.
When asked ‘would you do it differently?’ Tony simply replied ‘absolutely not’.
Dustin Krueger, a bartender at the tavern where the remarkable incident took place, described Tovar, a regular at the bar, as ‘a wild card that the [gunman] wasn’t expecting’.
According to the Riverfront Times, police are still on the lookout for the suspect in the case, who reportedly left the bar with only ‘a couple hundred dollars’ from the cash register.
No one was hurt during the robbery, and many people believe Tony was the reason for it.
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Charlie Cocksedge is a journalist and sub-editor at UNILAD. He graduated from the University of Manchester with an MA in Creative Writing, where he learnt how to write in the third person, before getting his NCTJ. His work has also appeared in such places as The Guardian, PN Review and the bin.