Milwaukee restaurant shot at after GOP candidate holds event there

Restaurant shot at after politician visits

Someone shot the window and door of a Puerto Rican restaurant in Milwaukee, just days Republican Eric Hovde held a campaign event there.

MILWAUKEE - Someone shot the outside of a Milwaukee restaurant just days after a political candidate held an event there.

At Lareños Restaurant on Milwaukee’s south side, their doors are open to all; rich or poor, liberal or conservative. That included Republican U.S. Senate candidate Eric Hovde, who hosted a roundtable at the restaurant last week. He also tweeted about the visit to the restuarant.

"We don’t discriminate. Anybody could come in, it don’t matter who you are," said Jose Cabrera, whose brother owns the restaurant. "The homeless people, when they come in and ask for food, we feed them. And we try to help the community like that."

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Six days later, someone shot one of the restuarant's windows and the front door's glass was shattered.

Lareños Restaurant

"We don’t know exactly what happened," Cabrera said. "It’s possible some people don’t like him. It’s possible they were just randomly, so I don’t want to say what it was, because I really don’t know."

It is not known whether the shooting was targeted against this business or was random. Business owners do know it will cost them $450 to just fix the door, based on an estimate they received.

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Cabrera said in the three years Lareños Restaurant has been opened, they have never had problems like this vandalism.

"None of this happened before," he said. "Why would they do something like that when we don’t mess with nobody?"

The family who runs the restaurant has many questions, but not a lot of answers.

The Hovde campaign told FOX6 it would pay to have repairs done at the restaurant.

"Whether this is a random shooting or an act of political intimidation, this sort of violence is completely unwarranted. Small business owners have enough to worry about just to keep the lights on — they should not have to deal with an attack like this," Hovde said in a statement to FOX6 News. "The bottom line is we need to come together politically and in our communities."

Back in 2020, the Wisconsin Republican Party reported graffiti at its location on Milwaukee's north side.