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‘World’s Chillest Man’ Asked Robbery Suspect for a Beer

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A gunman stormed a St. Louis bar at midnight, and one regular didn’t even put down his cigarette.

Shortly after midnight on August 28, 2019, an armed man burst into Behrmann’s Tavern in south St. Louis wielding what witnesses described as a modified firearm, ordering bartender Dustin Krueger and every customer to the floor. Everyone dropped — except Tony Tovar, a regular at the bar, who stayed parked on his stool through the entire holdup. The surveillance footage of his reaction has since made him a household name under a nickname nobody expected: the “World’s Chillest Man.”

• Surveillance video shows Tovar lighting a cigarette, sipping his drink, and pulling his phone away from the gunman’s reach while everyone else in Behrmann’s Tavern lay on the floor.
• Tovar told Inside Edition he even asked the robber to pour him another beer from behind the bar during the holdup.
• On August 30, 2019, St. Louis police arrested 37-year-old Kevin Jerome Moore, charging him with four counts of first-degree robbery and four counts of armed criminal action.

The Visual Evidence Presented

The clip that made Tovar famous is straightforward and almost absurd in its calm. As the gunman moves through Behrmann’s Tavern barking orders, patrons hit the deck one by one. Tovar doesn’t. He stays seated, lights a cigarette, takes a drink, and when the robber reaches for his phone, he simply pulls it back — no panic, no argument, just a guy protecting his phone from a stranger with a gun. NBC News and WSB-TV both aired the footage after it spread online, and it quickly racked up the kind of views that turn a random Wednesday-night robbery into a national story.

Tovar Explains Himself

Tovar sat down with Inside Edition to walk through what was going through his head, and his answer was less about bravado than exhaustion with being pushed around. He said he asked the gunman, who was working the bar himself during the robbery, to pour him another beer — a detail that sums up the whole video better than any description could.

“Sometimes you just have to stand up to punks like that.”

That line, which Tovar gave to reporters after the video blew up, became the quote attached to nearly every write-up of the incident. He framed his reaction less as fearlessness and more as a refusal to let a criminal dictate how his night went — he wasn’t going to be run out of his own bar stool.

The Arrest

Two days after the robbery, on August 30, 2019, St. Louis police charged Kevin Jerome Moore, 37, with four counts of first-degree robbery and four counts of armed criminal action tied to the Behrmann’s Tavern hold-up. The charges reflect the number of people in the bar that night — Krueger behind the counter and the patrons on the floor, Tovar included, even if he barely acted like he was part of the count.

Viral robbery footage tends to follow one of two patterns — sheer chaos, like the dashcam footage of a cash van crew under attack, or the opposite extreme Tovar delivered, where nothing about the room’s energy matches the gun in the frame. It’s the same reason clips of ordinary people staying weirdly composed under pressure, like the chaos that broke out at a Red Lobster over Mother’s Day wait times, tend to spread fast online — people can’t stop watching someone react to a bad situation completely wrong for the moment.

Moore’s case now heads through the St. Louis court system on those eight counts, while Tovar’s beer order to an armed robber remains the detail nobody who’s seen the footage can get out of their head.