Patrick Mcmahon
A coffee shop in Lynn, Mass., has permanently closed its doors after firing a manager who vented anti-police sentiments on Facebook. Kato Mele, the owner of the White Rose Coffeehouse, fired daughter Sophie one week after Sophie made the comments on her personal Facebook page, according to the Miami Herald.
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“I’ve lost my business, and I’ve lost my daughter,” she told The Daily Item. “I don’t know how this story just keeps building, but I need people to leave me alone.”
She says she is tired of being harassed: “People get behind a screen and say crazy things.”
“I will never allow a ‘coffee with a cop’ event to take place in my family’s establishment ever just so y’all know,” Sophie wrote in the initial Facebook post. In follow-up comments posted by the Daily Mail, Sophie called police “racists” and “killers,” adding, “They uphold an unjust system and murder without consequence.”
Mele fired her daughter in the wake of the comments and wrote a note of apology to local police, inviting them visit the shop and heal the rift, according to WCVB. The Lynn Police Department circulated the letter internally but left the decision to attend up to individual officers, they report.
She made the decision to close the year-old coffee shop for good just one week after her daughter’s comments.
