Deli Owner Faces Heavy Backlash After Tweeting Las Vegas Shooting Was ‘Community Outreach’

Joseph A. WulfsohnOct 3rd, 2017, 10:18 pm

A Chicagoland deli owner is facing heavy criticism for a tweet he made about the Las Vegas shooting.

Greg Morelli, co-owner of Max’s Deli in the northern Chicago suburb of Highland Park, was highly active on Twitter the morning after the massacre. In a tweet replying to one made by filmmaker Ava DuVernay, he wrote “Soon as I heard it was country music, I felt relief. White people shooting white people isn’t terror… it’s community outreach.”

That tweet has since been deleted.

After receiving immediate backlash, Morelli took to Facebook and issued a lengthy apology for his comments on the mass shooting and called it “MASS APOLOGY.”

“It was a dumb joke and it didn’t work. I own it. It was stupid,” Morelli said. “It was seven in the morning and I was stressed out and freaked out by the shooting… I was trying to participate, and all I did was put my foot in my mouth.”

He said he was sorry to his brother, who co-owns the Jewish deli, as well as his staff, who he said were answering threatening phone calls and had to close up the restaurant early.

The Facebook post had over 1,000 comments, many of them calling his apology “insincere” and vowing never to dine in his restaurant again.

This isn’t the first time Morelli has gotten himself in hot water. Last month, he took heat for putting a cartoon Nazi that resembled President Trump in a Facebook post promoting the restaurant’s menus for the recent Jewish holidays of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.

“I do not regret getting involved. I do not regret speaking out,” he wrote. “I do not regret assigning symbolism to hatred. I do not regret being trashed on Facebook. That said, it hurt.”

Morelli denied that the post, which he called “satire,” was supposed to depict Trump. He has a history of sharing politically-charged promotions for his restaurant, including one using Charlottesville and the NFL kneeling controversy.