Man dressed as Joker arrested for making terror threats, police say

‘Yes, I’m doing this for attention, but the attention I seek is to take over the world,’ says suspect

Jeremy J Garnier, 51, was dressed as the Joker when police arrested him for making terrorist threats via livestream (University City Police)

A man who dressed as comic supervillain the Joker has been arrested after he threatened to kill people via Facebook’s livestreaming app, police say.

Jeremy J Garnier, 51, was charged with making terrorist threats and is being held without bail in University City, Missouri.

University City Police said they found Mr Garnier dressed as the Joker, complete with face paint, inside a restaurant around 8.15pm on Tuesday.

They were responding to a report that Mr Garnier was making threats through the Facebook Live app.

According to Fox News, the University City resident said he would begin killing people and once his hour-long livestream reached a thousand viewers, he would “kill more”.

He said: “Yes, I’m doing this for attention, but the attention I seek is to take over the world.

“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.

“We’re not going to go to any movie theatres. 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.”

The livestream showed Mr Garnier putting on his costume, going to a shopping mall and being turned away by security guards, and entering the Blueberry Hill restaurant, where he was arrested.

He reportedly told a bartender at the bar inside the restaurant he did not drink alcohol because “I can’t be inebriated when I’m planning on, you know, killing a bunch of people”.

Mr Garnier identified himself to viewers as Jeremy Joseph Garnier and added: “I’m not armed and I weigh 150 pounds. 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.”