According to the Bowling Green NAACP and restaurant customers, police showed body camera footage from the night Breonna Taylor was shot and killed in her Louisville apartment in 2020 to customers at a Greek restaurant on Tuesday night.
When the Bowling Green Country Club, the original location for the group’s dinner, announced that it would no longer host the group, the Republican Women’s Club of South Central Kentucky was forced to scramble to find a new location for an event featuring former Louisville police officer turned conservative author and pundit John Mattingly. Additionally, according to Spectrum News in Louisville, Ryan Quarles, a candidate for governor and the commissioner of agriculture for Kentucky, canceled his appearance at the event due to the growing uproar about Mattingly’s attendance.
While Anna’s Greek Restaurant was still open to customers who were not participating in the event, the Tuesday night event was held on the balcony of the establishment. The restaurant’s lights went out as customers who were not involved in the event heard and saw graphic descriptions of the incident that killed Taylor, according to accounts posted online by the Bowling Green-Warren County NAACP and restaurant patrons. The restaurant’s sound system allowed patrons to hear the audio from that evening throughout the establishment.
Restaurant customers were not informed of the event’s impending arrival, according to Cayce Johnson, who wrote about it on Facebook. She also said that it grew so intrusive that “we were no longer able to even hear others at our table and hardly could see our food.”
Johnson told NBC News on Friday that she didn’t know what was going on when she walked into the restaurant. A Bowling Green resident said that the videos showed Taylor’s dead body and real gunshots.
“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, the community honestly.”
