Diners at a Greek restaurant in Bowling Green, Kentucky, on Tuesday night were subjected to police body camera footage from the night Breonna Taylor was shot and killed in her Louisville apartment in 2020, according to the local NAACP and restaurant patrons.
The Republican Women’s Club of South Central Kentucky scrambled to find a new venue for an event featuring former-Louisville-police-officer-turned-conservative-author-and-pundit John Mattingly after the initial location for its dinner, the Bowling Green Country Club, said it would no longer host the group. Additionally, gubernatorial candidate and Kentucky Agriculture Commissioner Ryan Quarles backed out of the event because of the mounting controversy around Mattingly’s attendance, according to Spectrum News in Louisville.
Mattingly was one of the three police officers who raided Taylor's home and fired shots while searching her apartment for her ex-boyfriend, Jamarcus Glover. He was not in the apartment at the time. Glover was handed a five-year probation sentence in 2021 after he accepted a plea deal from prosecutors for charges related to narcotics.
The Tuesday night event took place in the balcony of Anna's Greek Restaurant, while it was still open to patrons unaffiliated with the event. According to the Bowling Green-Warren County NAACP and restaurant patrons' accounts online, the lights went dark, as patrons unaffiliated with the event heard and saw graphic descriptions of the incident that killed Taylor. The audio from that night could be heard throughout the restaurant, through its speaker system.
Cayce Johnson, who posted an account of the evening to Facebook, said that restaurant patrons were given no warning the event would take place and that it became so invasive that “we were no longer able to even hear people at our table and barely could see our food.”
Johnson told NBC News on Friday that she was not made aware of the event before entering the restaurant. The Bowling Green resident said she heard actual gunshots in the videos and that they showed footage of Taylor’s body.
“Words can’t even describe how absolutely disgusting it is, what this group put on, the platform they gave him and what he showed to them,” Johnson said. “These women, they need to be held accountable. Not just Anna’s restaurant but the group themselves that put it on, and at the very least they need to apologize to the people that they offended, to Breonna Taylor’s family and, and the community honestly.”
The restaurant did not reply to a voicemail left requesting comment.
Prior to the event, the Republican Women’s Club said in a statement that it invited Mattingly to speak at the event “to obtain a firsthand account” of the raid that resulted in Taylor’s death.
“These events may be controversial, however, we believe Sgt. Mattingly has the right to share his experience,” the group said in a statement to Spectrum News in Louisville earlier this week. “Other individuals with firsthand experience relating to this case are welcome to request an opportunity to speak to our organization as well.”
Stacy Webb, the president of the women’s club, has not responded to a request for comment. The group’s Facebook page has since been deleted.
“It is beyond reprehensible to subject anyone, let alone children and customers of African American descent, to such indecent exposure, graphic and upsetting images while they were attempting to enjoy their meal,” Ryan Dearbone, president of the Bowling Green-Warren County NAACP chapter, said in a statement Thursday. “Such disturbing occurrences must not be tolerated especially in places of public accommodation. At a minimum, these acts are devoid of humanity and violate the most fundamental principles of human decency.”
CORRECTION (Jan. 20, 2023, 3:45 p.m. ET): A previous version of this article misspelled the last name of the Kentucky agriculture commissioner. He is Ryan Quarles, not Quarle.
