Imagine this situation: you are minding your own business when suddenly an armed robber confronts you. He asks you to hand over your valuables. Even though your heart is beating a mile a minute, you know that keeping your wits about you during a crisis like this could be the thing that saves your life.
That’s exactly what happened to Tony Tovar.
The patrons and staff of Behrmann’s Tavern, a small dive bar in St. Louis that has been operating for more than 80 years, were about to have the shake-up of their lives.
But one regular customer wasn’t going to stand for it.
Dustin Kruegar was the bartender on duty that day. He told KSDK that Berhmann’s is “A quiet comfortable living-room place where people go to get away from their lives, so they don’t have to deal with stuff.”
That day, Tony was kicking back at his favorite local watering hole and enjoying a few cold ones when the man stormed in.
“I look up at the door and there some guy there with an awfully big gun,” Krueger told KSDK.
Surveillance footage from the bar’s security cameras captured the event as it unfolded.
The armed man yelled for everyone to get down on the ground and hand over their phones and wallets.
In the footage, you can clearly see Tony sitting at the bar while all the other patrons hit the deck and comply with the lone gunman’s demands. He takes a pull from his drink and watches it all go down.
But the King of Cool doesn’t move from his seat.
While chaos continues to erupt in the bar, Tony is as cool as a cucumber. The gunman seems a little unsure of himself as Tony continues to ignore him. He doesn’t even flinch.
The thief orders the barman to open the cash register, but Tony still refuses to move.
At one point, Tony finds himself staring right down the barrel of a gun. But he continues to sip his beer and casually check his phone. He is completely unflappable.
Then, he nonchalantly lights up a cigarette.
But how did he manage to remain so calm during the ordeal? Well, he says he’d simply had enough.
“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,” Tony told KSDK.
But it’s the hilarious exchange that Tony had with the thief that made headlines.
The thief comes around the bar, presses his gun into Tony’s ribs, and reaches for Tony’s wallet and phone.
“He was reaching for my phone and what is going through my mind is, ‘This is not going to happen,'” he told Inside Edition.
But Tony calmly snatches it away again. In fact, he’s almost zen-like in his demeanor.
“He said, ‘I am going to need the money [from] your wallet’ and I said, ‘I have $2 and that is for my next beer,’” Tony said. “I actually told him ‘As long as you are back there, why don’t you get me a beer?’ He said, ‘No! Get your own beer!'”
“Sometimes you just have to stand up to punks like that,” he told Inside Edition.
When the surveillance footage of the robbery went viral, Tony, who is a 57-year-old mechanic, was dubbed the ‘World’s Chillest Man.’
In the end, the thief only managed to get away with $200 from the cash register before hightailing it out of the bar.
“I wasn’t really concerned. I just had a really good feeling he wasn’t out to harm anybody. He just wanted drug money,” Tony flippantly told KSDK.
To watch the way Tony dealt with the situation, watch the video below!
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