A 48-year-old artist going by the name JDubb was arrested by Saint Louis Police in Missouri for allegedly live-streaming himself going on a rampage while dressed up as The Joker.
“Yes I’m doing this for attention, but the attention I seek is to take over the world,” Jeremy Joseph Garnier, also known as JDubb, Uncle Dubb, or Clouty the Clown, says early in the video which was live-streamed using the Facebook Live app on Monday evening, ArcaMax reported.
“I’m going to start killing people until this reaches a thousand [viewers], and once it reaches a thousand, I’m going to go out in public, and I’m going to kill more,” Clouty added.
In his nearly one-hour-long live-stream, Garnier, in full Joker make-up can be seen getting dressed as the Joker, driving a car, visiting a mall in Richmond Heights, and ranting about the rampage he is going to undertake along the Delmar Loop in Saint Louis.
“We’re not going to go to any movie theaters. We’re going to go totally unarmed because we don’t want to alert the authorities into thinking we might be on an actual rampage,” he says.
Garnier heads for the busy shopping area in University City, west Saint Louis. First, he gets stopped by security guards when he wants to enter the Galleria shopping mall. Some time later, Garnier is admitted to Blueberry Hill bar and restaurant and orders a soda.
“Yeah, I can’t be inebriated when I’m planning on, you know, killing a bunch of people,” he says. “It’s not something you can do. I’m live on Facebook right now. I’ve got like nearly 2,000 people watching me.”
As he stares out of the window overlooking the parking lot, a police car can be seen stopping. Officers who were possibly alerted by concerned viewers can be seen getting out.
“I think they’re looking for me,” Garnier says, “but it’s OK.”
“I’m not armed, and I weigh 150 pounds,” he added while the police officers are approaching. “I don’t have no weapons on me. I’m not going to do nothing. You’ve got me messed up. Except all these bombs.”
Police officers enter and put Garnier under arrest, at which point the live-stream comes to an end.
Garnier was held without bond at St. Louis County Jail and charged with a first-degree felony of making terrorist threats, noting that he was a “danger to the community.”
In 2012 another man, James Holmes, donned a Joker outfit and shot and killed 12 people and wounded 70 others in a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, during the screening of the Batman movie “The Dark Knight Rises.”
However, Garnier still has some friends who do not believe he was seriously going to The Galleria shopping mall to kill people.
Glenda Volk started a GoFundMe initiative to get Garnier out of jail, saying, “Someone reported mistakenly that he was making ‘threats’ when he was only playing a role.”
“While this was undoubtedly not Jeremy’s best decision considering the consequences … he was not threatening anyone,” Volk says. “As he says… he was chasing ‘clout’… trying to increase his Facebook viewers and bring attention to the opiate crisis plaguing this country,” she added.
The stated goal of the funding initiative is to get a “psych evaluation to show he truly is not a threat to society and to hopefully get a bond and get these charges dropped or at least reduced.”
So far, $516 has been raised.
Garnier has a criminal record for multiple burglaries and robbery. The charging document does not mention any weapons or bombs that were found in his possession, or whether he as an attorney.