Owner Of Ohio Bakery Ransacked By Rioters Says She’s Getting Threats For Cooperating With Law Enforcement
Kelly Kandah, who owns a cupcake bakery that was one of the hundreds of businesses attacked and ransacked during recent riots, says she’s been receiving threats for cooperating with law enforcement officials investigating those responsible for using peaceful protests as cover for violence.
Speaking to Fox News on Monday, Kandah, who owns Colossal Cupcakes in Cleveland, Ohio, said she’s received notes and messages threatening to loot, ransack, and burn down her store if she reopens.
Kandah, the outlet reports, said the threats “include people telling her that when her store is rebuilt, ‘it’s going to get hit again.'”
“She said she also received complaints that her cooperation with investigators is ‘unfair,’ that she shouldn’t be cooperating with the FBI and that what she is doing is ‘against the cause, which I’m actually absolutely for the cause, but it’s upsetting people that I would involve the police over something such as property,'” according to Fox.
Kandah’s store was targeted by looters and rioters who took advantage of massive anti-racism and anti-police brutality protests that swept the nation following the death of George Floyd, a black man who perished while in the custody of the Minneapolis Police Department.
She and her staff hid in the back of the store, hoping to protect themselves and the shop’s expensive bakery equipment while rioters broke the store’s windows and ransacked the dining room.
“My family built it up, [I] listened to it get absolutely destroyed,” she said in an interview last month. “That whole time we were locked in there … I just listened to everything getting shattered and crushed.”
In a follow-up interview Monday, Kandah said that, while the rioting has ended, the violence has not.
“I was showing some of the damage and I was leaving, a friend and myself, and someone walking by approached us and said, ‘When the store rebuilds, when you rebuild this, I’m going to come back and destroy it again and you.’ He kept walking and was gone,” she said.
The threat, Kandah said, was made in reference to her decision to cooperate with local and federal law enforcement agencies who are seeking answers about the riots, specifically how they began, who was involved, and whether the riots were organized by Antifa or some other criminal enterprise.
She also says she’s not alone in being scared to reopen.
“It’s just really sad,” Kandah told Fox. “Unfortunately my store is not open right now and I’m so involved with the community and I’m so involved with our inner-city schools and I’m so for the cause that I do a lot of community service. Right now, I can’t. I don’t have anything being brought in to be able to donate as much as I usually do.”
Authorities have made dozens of arrests relating to riots and looting but most of the perpetrators, the Department of Justice says, aren’t connected to any larger organization. The FBI, instead, is taking a look at how rioters and looters, who used and disrupted the protests over George Floyd’s death, received funding. Arrests that point to a larger criminal organization may come later.
