St. Louis Queer Bars Hit With Shooting, Bomb Threats

“The caller, off the bat, started talking about how they were the Joker, and they were going to blow up the bar, send bombs, and shoot up everybody,” says Jordan Cox, a bartender at St. Louis queer bar Prism. Around 4 p.m. on Saturday, Prism and two other St. Louis establishments, Just John and Rehab, got similar threats from an anonymous caller. All three queer bars are located on Manchester Avenue in the Grove neighborhood of St Louis.

Because the call came into Prism just as the first of two planned events for that day was beginning, owner Sean Abernathy had to decide in a split second how to respond. “This is all coming at a community that’s just trying to exist,” he told the Riverfront Times. “We’re not trying to hurt anybody. We just want to be able to exist and have a good time.” As such, he chose not to close the bar entirely, but limited entry only to those who were on the list for the planned events and brought in extra security.

Owner of Just John, John Oberkramer, said the bar received a voicemail specifically threatening to “shoot the place up” at 3 a.m. and mentioning an employee by name–because the caller liked him and wanted to make sure he wouldn’t be there that night. In response, he communicated the threat to staff and warned security to be extra vigilant.

Around midnight, St. Louis police, accompanied by other members of law enforcement, who Sean Abernathy of Prism said appeared to be federal agents rather than local police, came to Prism to talk to Abernathy. While there, they confirmed Abernathy’s suspicions that Just John had also been threatened. Both owners said they had believed that Rehab had been threatened as well, which St. Louis Police later confirmed in a statement to the public.

In the aftermath of these thankfully unrealized and, so far as we know, unattempted, threats, Abernathy and Oberkramer said they would stay open. “We might beef up security somewhat, but they’re not going to close us down because of a threat like that.”