MINNEAPOLIS — A bar owner whose nearly century-old watering hole was torched by rioters during the 2020 George Floyd riots slammed Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as a “criminal” who let the city descend into a lawless hellscape by refusing to immediately call in the National Guard.
Bill Hupp, who owned the Hexagon Bar in the Seward neighborhood, roared that the fiery destruction of his family-run business rested on Walz’s shoulders.
“It’s just complete neglect of the people you are supposed to represent,” the 74-year-old father of six said of Walz’s actions at the time.
“He could have called [the guardsmen] in [but] he didn’t,” Hupp added. “I didn’t have a drop of water put on my place. Not a drop of water for those three and a half days! Crazy. It’s [a] complete loss of leadership, totally.”
As mayhem coursed through the state’s largest capital, with rioters looting businesses and setting storefronts aflame, Walz, a 24-year National Guard veteran who took office the year before, waited an astonishing 18 hours after Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey pleaded for at least 600 guardsmen before finally sending in the troops.
The frightening chaos had ripped through the Twin Cities after local police officer Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd on May 25, 2020.
When Walz finally acted, on May 28, 2020, he sent just 100 guardsmen, according to a damning post-mortem from the state’s Senate and Minneapolis residents.
Those that did arrive did little to control the damage ripping through the city — including the destruction of the Hexagon Bar.
On May 28, 2020, Hupp said he, along with his son and a few of his son’s friends, had been boarding up the bar’s windows around 6:30 p.m. when roughly 300 people surrounded the venue.
The rioters began throwing frozen water bottles and shoes at them, while refusing to let the group leave, and calling them “white privilege.”
“We thought they were going to kill us. They pretty much kidnapped us,” he said, adding, “We didn’t know if we were going to get out of there.”
The group eventually managed to make their way home, but in the early morning hours of May 29, 2020, the 92-year-old venue erupted in flames after an arsonist and his two accomplices chucked Molotov cocktails at the back of the building.
“All of a sudden everything went bright white,” said Hupp, who saw the devastation on his surveillance camera.
All that remained were the charred brick walls.
“It completely burned my place exactly to the ground.”
Walz’s leadership during one of the worst crises to roil Minneapolis in modern history has come under renewed scrutiny since Vice President Kamala Harris tapped him as her running mate on the Democratic ticket this week.
Beyond dragging his heels on sending in the National Guard, Walz also has been accused of sharing confidential information with his then-teenage daughter, including law enforcements’ plans and the troops’ response times.
Hupp, who demanded an apology from Walz for the community, called Harris’ decision to pick him as her Vice Presidential candidate “absolute insanity,” and decried the state’s governor as “a criminal.”
“It’s crazy,” he said. “Why? Because of [his] total ineptness of leadership…[his] absolute ignorance of safety for people and the way of handling it properly.”
“He should have never been in the position he was in.”
Walz’s office did not respond to a request for comment.