Kentucky GOP Club Interrupts People's Dinner For Dramatic Reenactment Of Breonna Taylor Shooting

Repulsive doesn't quite describe this.

The Republican Women’s Club of South Central Kentucky held an event last week in honor of former Louisville Metro Sgt. Jonathan Mattingly, one of the cops who shot and killed Louisville woman Breonna Taylor. That seems like a curious choice for a women's club until you remember Taylor was Black.

The gross event occurred at Anna’s Greek Restaurant in Bowling Green. The place has a dining area and space on the second floor for private events. Mattingly’s presentation contained graphic visual aids, including photos and video footage with gunshot noises. He's free to do this because a grand jury found that Mattingly and Det. Myles Cosgrove acted in self-defense when they killed Taylor. Her boyfriend Kenneth Walker did fire his gun at the men who broke into her apartment without identifying themselves. Mattingly was shot in the thigh, which is a bummer, but that's the the risk of no-knock raids in a state where too many people have guns. The Department of Justice also spared Mattingly when it filed charges against officers involved in the raid.

Mattingly since retired, and Taylor remains dead. However, Mattingly feels greatly inconvenienced by the whole thing and released a self-serving "tell all" book last year that reportedly "conflicts" with other accounts of the botched raid that killed Taylor.

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Prior to last Tuesday's event at Anna's Greek Restaurant, the Republican Women's Club described Mattingly's appearance as an opportunity “to obtain a firsthand account” of the raid. Mattingly is admittedly in a better position than Taylor to provide his side of the story.

The Republican Women's Club said in a statement to Spectrum News in Louisville:  "These events may be controversial; however, we believe Sgt. Mattingly has the right to share his experience. Other individuals with firsthand experience relating to this case are welcome to request an opportunity to speak to our organization as well."

Taylor is dead, and Walker is traumatized. Neither is available to entertain the Republican Women's Club.

According to restaurant patrons who were unaffiliated with the group but presumably just came for the spanakopita, the lights went dark and they were subjected to graphic descriptions of Taylor's death. The speaker system broadcast audio of Mattingly's grotesque performance throughout the restaurant.

Anna's is a rennovated old church, which only adds to the perversion. Cayce Johnson, a guest at the restaurant during the event, told The New Republic, “The woman comes back on and introduces Jonathan Mattingly, and everyone just roared upstairs — applause, cheers, and our mouths just dropped.”

 From The New Republic:  

Johnson said Mattingly took the audience “back to March 2020” before going through the presentation with photos and video footage with the sound of gunshots. “One of the members of our group was a war veteran and he has PTSD, so we were just in extreme shock.”

Katelyn Jones, another diner, told TNR the event also included a raffle and jokes about Covid-19. She said the event was initially so loud her father couldn’t hear anything at the table.

Mattingly's demonstrated respect for human life is overwhelming.

Restaurant owner, Vilson Qehaja, responded to complaints from patrons by "literally shrugging his shoulders" and, according to video footage , telling them, “I have no idea what’s happening, so ... I have nothing to do with that, so.”

One of Johnson’s friends said “Do you realize who that is? They killed somebody, a cop. He’s a cop…I made reservations, I came from Kansas City.”

“You’re being served, right?” Qehaja responded.

Guests say Qehaja later simply turned up the music.

“He was drinking his coffee and staring at us raising his eyebrows, kind of intimidating us, like, ‘What are you going to do?’” Johnson said. Qehaja’s behavior mimicked what event attendees upstairs allegedly were doing, as guests claimed men from the audience glared down from the second-floor balcony at restaurant-goers, seeming to warn them not to disrupt their event.

Anna's was apparently the Republican Women's Club's second choice for the Mattingly event. He was originally scheduled to appear alongside Agriculture Commissioner and Kentucky gubernatorial candidate Ryan Quarles at the Bowling Green Country Club, but after some media attention, Quarles and the country club backed out. The women's club posted on its now removed Facebook page that Mattingly would “share what really happened during the raid that killed Breonna Taylor, what he saw, and how the media’s narrative has been corrupted and twisted to fit into a false, woke storyline.”

Cops burst into Breonna Taylor's home unannounced and shot her to death. Former Louisville Police Det. Kelly Goodlett confessed to falsifying the no-knock warrant application with another officer. That's not a "false, woke storyline." That's the disturbing reality. Breonna Taylor should still be alive, and Mattingly should spend every moment for the remainder of his life regretting the actions his fellow officers made that resulted in his killing an innocent woman. But I guess if Mattingly were capable of true human remorse, he'd have pursued a different line of work.

[ New Republic / NBC News ]

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