The Tampa Bay Rays might have to find a new department to help secure their baseball stadium after angering the local sheriff with a tweet about Breonna Taylor.
Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri called Rays President Matt Silverman on Sunday to express his distaste for a tweet the team sent out demanding that Taylor’s “killers” be arrested. He threatened to reconsider his deal with the team to provide security for games because of the “uncalled-for” tweet.
“To turn a baseball event into a political event is uncalled for,” Gualtieri told the Tampa Bay Times. “It’s just wrong, and it’s improper. It’s just reckless. It’s throwing gasoline on the fire, and it didn’t need to happen.”
Gualtieri, a Republican, said that the public doesn’t “know all the facts” about Taylor’s death, so the tweet should not have been sent. Taylor, a 26-year-old healthcare worker, died in March after St. Louis police officers carried out a no-knock warrant on her apartment in the middle of the night. Her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, said he thought it was a home invasion, so he shot at the officers. The officers returned fire, hitting Taylor eight times, according to accounts of the incident.
“Today is Opening Day, which means it’s a great day to arrest the killers of Breonna Taylor,” the team tweeted in the post that outraged Gualtieri.
Gualtieri said that Silverman told him the tweet was not authorized by upper-level management. Several professional sports leagues have drawn attention to the Black Lives Matter movement, including Taylor’s death.
