Diners at Anna's Greek Restaurant in Bowling Green, Kentucky were caught totally off guard when a local Republican group showed up to hold an event for one of the police officers from the raid that killed Breonna Taylor — and aired body camera footage from the incident in front of all the patrons.
The event, which was reported by NBC News on Friday, enraged many of the onlookers.
"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," reported Michelle Garcia. "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," said the report. "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."
The NAACP of Bowling Green-Warren County condemned the event, calling it "threatening and inappropriate." One of the patrons that night, Cayce Johnson, confirmed she and other unaffiliated diners were given no warning and blasted the GOP group and the restaurant, saying, "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."
A Kentucky grand jury indicted only one of the three officers involved in the fatal raid, and on a relatively minor charge. However, one officer, Joshua Jaynes, was also charged federally for lying on the application for the "no-knock" warrant
