Sam Amico
A St. Louis man who pretended to be The Joker was taken seriously, and now he’s been sentenced to 60 days in jail.
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Jeremy Garnier, 51, pleaded guilty to a third-degree misdemeanor charge of making a terrorist threat after saying he intended to “start killing people” during a live stream from the bar in 2020.
In the Facebook video, Garnier had dyed his hair green and painted his face to try to resemble the famous Batman villain, who was portrayed by Joaquin Phoenix in the 2019 movie Joker. So, the movie and this incident took place at about the same time.
“Please allow me to introduce myself — I’m the Joker,” Garnier said in the liven stream, via Oxygen.
“I’m going to start killing people until this reaches a 1,000 [people watching]. And once it reaches a 1,000, I’m going to go out in public and I’m going to kill more.”
Later, Garnier was arrested while streaming from the Blueberry Hill restaurant and bar. No weapons were found at the time of the arrest and Garnier actually harmed no one.
It sounds as if Garnier was merely playing a role, having fun by playing a famous villain. But these days, you can never be too sure, and threatening to kill a thousand people on a live stream clearly warrants police action — joke or not.
“I was talking like The Joker,” Garnier told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, via Oxygen. “I was in character. Everybody knew that it was a joke and that I had no intentions of following through with a threat.”
Nonetheless, Garnier is headed to jail. And that’s not something about which to joke.
