The Twitter personality "jj smith" is suddenly hiding his tweets after making a series of pretty violent threats, and there is at least one tire-slashing incident in which he was allegedly somehow involved.

You may be familiar with the tweets of one of the Tenderloin’s most celebrated online trolls "jj smith," but you probably won’t see any more of his tweets anytime soon. While he generally chases attention pretty aggressively, "jj smith" has suddenly made his tweets protected and no longer visible to the public at large. And you have to figure this has something to do with a just-published exposé in the SF Standard on his recent pattern of online threats and two alleged tire-slashing incidents, where he admits to being on the scene at one of the tire-slashings.

This "jj smith" is not a person named JJ Smith — it’s the online handle of Tenderloin deli owner Omar Ward. He’s amassed 35,000 Twitter/X followers with his confrontational Tenderloin poverty-porn videos tailored to the crowd that loves to trash San Francisco. He’s received glowing profile segments from KGO, KRON4, and KPIX, and his videos are of course catnip for Fox News.

One KGO segment even said Ward was “using compassion rather than criticism” to supposedly fight the city’s drug crisis. They must not have been familiar with the tone of his now-hidden tweets, and certainly not an alleged tire-slashing incident last Friday in Oakland where Ward admitted to being present and leaving a threatening note.

As the Standard reports, a rival Twitter personality named Kevin Jones who goes by the handle Doomloop Dispatch was outside Oakland’s Thee Stork Club, scrolling on his phone, when a friend sent him a notice that Ward had just posted a video of him. The 19-second video was of Ward standing outside the Thee Stork Club and had been taken only moments before.

When Jones left the nightclub, he found all four tires on his car slashed, a burnt sock stuffed in his gas tank, and a threatening note on his windshield. Ward admits having been there and leaving the note.

The note read, “Have you ever seen a cheetah hunt it’s prey a cheetah is camouflage by there [sic] spots so there prey don’t see them then they move in at the right time.”

Ward denies involvement with the tire-slashing and the sock-stuffing, but admitted to the Standard that he left the note.  

“My issue was with him [Jones]. A car can’t fight back,” Ward told the Standard. “It wouldn’t benefit me to hurt his car.”

And as for the threatening tone, Ward said “I was just telling him about cheetahs,” and “I could talk to him about all kinds of animals.”

Uhh... sure.

Nor is this the only tire-slashing in which Ward is alleged to have been involved. A separate online personality Ward often beefs with, Dimitry Yakoushkin, posted a tweet in  response that he too had his tires slashed, as well as a window broken at his house. In a video accompanying the above post, Ward can be heard saying “How your BMW doing? And your broken window?” before busting into a celebratory laugh.  

And for good measure, Ward posted a now-deleted response to another Twitter rival this past Saturday morning (just hours after the Oakland tire-slashing incident). “I swear on my dead father I’m going to find you and do you worse,” Ward wrote, “After I’m finished your going to want to call the police you’ll want to keep playing with me but you’ll forget I’m a motherfucking criminal. I don’t give a fuck about going to jail.”

Indeed, much like another celebrated Tenderloin Twitter personality "Raw Ricci” Wynne, the men behind these accounts often have far longer or at least comparable criminal rap sheets than the drug users they’re confronting and recording. In Ward’s case, he was found guilty of possession of cocaine with intent to distribute in 2006. His seven-and-a-half-year sentence was curiously only half of what federal sentencing guidelines recommended, leading to some speculation that Ward is now a police informant.

Ward himself has fed into this suspicion, as the Standard notes that on a Twitter Spaces conversation this past Sunday, Ward “said he had aided in SFPD drug investigations.” Whether this is true, it’s led to speculation that Ward’s increasingly brazen and threatening behavior is enabled because the cops won’t come down on an informant.  

Obviously, SFPD would not confirm to the Standard whether or not Ward is a police informant, and Ward denies this.  

But as the Standard details, Ward has picked an increasing number of fights with his political enemies on Twitter in the last month. It will be interesting to see if this continues, or to not see if this continues, because Ward is now pretty much hiding his tweets.  

Related: SF-Bashing Twitter Troll ‘Raw Ricci’ Arrested for Allegedly Pimping Women Out of His Luxury SoMa Apartment [SFist]

Screenshot via Fox News