Detroit man’s hairline faces harsher sentencing than his armed robbery charges
In the early hours of October 30, a Shell gas station in Troy, Michigan, became the scene of a chilling armed robbery that’s since spiraled into one of social media’s strangest phenomena. Police say 38-year-old Joseph Louis Carter walked into the station on Rochester Road just after 2:30 a.m. Allegedly, he was carrying what looked like an AK-47-style rifle. Dressed in dark clothes and wearing a mask, he pointed the weapon at the cashier and demanded cash. His words — “Give me everything,” “Count to a hundred,” and “If you move, you die” — were all caught on camera.
Despite the intensity, no one was hurt, and Carter left the store on foot with an undisclosed amount of cash. Detectives from Troy Police, backed by the ATF and multiple Michigan agencies, tracked him down over the next week. On November 8, he was arrested without incident. The following Monday, November 10, he was arraigned on charges including armed robbery, felon in possession of a firearm, and two counts of felony firearm (second offense). Bond was denied, keeping him in Oakland County Jail.
That should have been the headline: a repeat offender with a dangerous weapon caught thanks to swift police coordination. But the public’s focus veered somewhere else entirely — straight to Carter’s mugshot and, more specifically, the hairline that seemed to defy geometry itself…