Seattle’s KCPQ-TV reports the owner’s son apologized, and law enforcement members will get free meals Monday at the restaurant in Sedro-Wooley, about 70 miles north of Seattle.
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On Thursday, while Skagit County deputies ate lunch at Lucky Teriyaki, a different group spilled their soup and drinks on the table, the owner told Kiro 7 in Mandarin. Sheriff Reichardt said not only did the owner repeat the request, but asked that the Sheriff’s Office spread the word to other law enforcement officers that they were also no long welcome.
But Xuechuang says that police are always welcome at Lucky Teriyaki and that his father never meant to say officers weren’t welcome.
Li Xuechuang, the owner’s son, said he told the deputies that they were making other customers “uncomfortable” and that they “didn’t like law enforcement there”.
It was a post that shocked the small community of Sedro-Woolley.
“My chief deputy spoke to the owner to confirm this because he simply could not believe what he was hearing”.
Sheriff Will Reichardt wrote in a Facebook post on Thursday that the situation completely took him by surprise.
This afternoon 4 Skagit County Sheriff’s office deputies were finishing up lunch at Lucky’s.
“Didn’t you understand that they were giving you a chance to straighten this out?”
The son says he didn’t understand the questions, and he may have just answered, “Yeah”, to the chief deputy’s inquiries, not grasping the gravity of what was about to happen. Thousands left comments on Lucky Teriyaki’s Facebook page and another calling for a boycott, expressing outrage. Skagit County Sheriff Will Reichardt posted the story to Facebook, and as these sorts of things are wont to do, it went viral, shared some 12,000 times by Friday morning.
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Police in Washington state were shaking their heads in disbelief after a restaurant owner in Sedro-Woolley in essence told four officers who were in the middle of dining: After you eat, leave – and don’t come back.
