Video shows man calmly lighting cigarette as armed robber points gun at him at bar: 'Another punk trying to pull a punk move'
ST. LOUIS, MISSOURI: When an armed robber showed up at a bar in St. Louis, demanding everyone get on the floor with hands above their heads, everyone complied except one man.
"I look up at the door and there some guy there with an awfully big gun," Dustin Krueger, bartender at Berhmann's, the bar where the incident took place, said.
In the surveillance footage from inside the bar from the time of the robbery, one patron, later identified as Tony Tovar, was seen calmly lighting a cigarette while remaining on his seat when the masked robber stormed into the bar with what police later described as a "heavily modified" gun.
A thoroughly unamused Tovar did not even move a muscle when the man sitting next to him put his hands up and got underneath the bar counter. After observing the situation, Tovar went back to browsing his phone.
At one point, the robber walked up to Tovar and pointed the gun at his back. Seeing no terror in his eyes, the burglar attempted to snatch his phone away from him, but Tovar did not let him.
As the robber beckoned the bar owner to open the cash register to give him the money, Tovar calmly took out a cigarette and lit it, all the while staring down the firearm's barrel.
Seeing Tovar's nonchalant attitude, the man next to him also started taking drags from his already lit cigarette, although he seemed more restless and tense than his companion.
"I said not another punk trying to pull a punk move," Tovar later told KSDK-TV."I'm so tired of people in south city trying to muscle their way in with firearms or bad attitude or some kind of aggression. I wasn't gonna comply."
No one was hurt and the robber left after looting the cash drawer and the wallets of some of the patrons at the bar—an ending Tovar said his gut had forecasted.
"I wasn't really concerned," he said. "I just had a really good feeling he wasn't out to harm anybody. He just wanted drug money."
In conclusion, Tovar said that, while he would not suggest anyone follow in his footsteps, given a chance, he would not change his reaction.
Krueger described the bar as "a quiet comfortable living room place where people go to get away from their lives, so they don't have to deal with stuff." It was only the second time in 83 years that anyone had tried to rob the place.
A local man, Kevin Moore was later charged in connection with the heist. He has prior convictions of first-degree assault, first-degree robbery and unlawful possession of a firearm.