Along with the drastic changes in lifestyle resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic that has disrupted the world over the past few weeks, a viral video of a man licking the items on the shelves of a Missouri grocery store changes the standards of what should be considered public terror.
A video, reportedly from March 11 via Snapchat, shows a man named Cody Pfister licking shelves of deodorant at a Walmart store in Warrenton, Missouri. On March 25, the Warren County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office reportedly charged the 26-year-old with low level felony and a second degree terrorist threat.
Given, Patrick J. Coyne, Pfister’s attorney, pointed out that actions from a couple of weeks before should not be held to today’s standards of pandemic prevention.
“Everything has changed at warp speed, but that should not work retroactively and convert a tasteless and impulsive act into a criminal terrorist threat,” Coyne said in a statement.
However, Pfister himself seemed well aware of the palpable fear the Coronavirus had already caused by the time he filmed this video on March 11.
“Who’s afraid of the Coronavirus?” Pfister taunted in the video.
Pfister’s words clearly show that he was aware of the terror of COVID-19 that was already sweeping the globe. More alarmingly, they show his goal was to simultaneously ridicule and escalate this sense of terror among the general public.
A tweet from Dr. John Njenga Karugia naming Pfister as a “virus monster” shows the original video Pfister posted to Snapchat.
But is the charge of a threat of terrorism justified?
A mere month ago, though a video like Pfister’s would have been certainly frowned upon, a subsequent charge of terror would have been out of the question. But in this critical point in the global effort to curb the spread of Coronavirus, Pfister’s actions are obviously an attempt to spread fear while also possibly spreading the virus.
According to the FBI of the United States, the definition of terrorism is “violent, criminal acts committed by individuals and/or groups to further ideological goals stemming from domestic influences, such as those of a political, religious, social, racial, or environmental nature.” But in a time when, as Pfister’s attorney said, everything is changing at “warp speed,” so should the standards of terror.
The goal of Pfister’s video is clear; to both invalidate the very necessary precautions of public to prevent the spread of the virus while spreading more fear to the public by showing the spread of his own germs. These obvious intentions thereby justify the charge of a second degree terrorist threat.
Fear is a real enemy while enduring a time period defined by pandemic, and law enforcement must treat acts of terror committed to spreading this fear as such. Acts of ignorance like Pfister’s raise anxieties surrounding public sanity, causing a possibly comedic prank to become a malicious threat to public health.
Read more about balancing necessary precaution with unnecessary anxiety about the Coronavirus here.
