TUCSON, AZ – We want to introduce you to Kelly Walker. The story of what he and his family have been through over the past four years is nothing short of being both awe-inspiring and nauseating at the same time. As you read the details, please remember that this isn’t happening in Canada or in Australia, or Cold War era Soviet Russia…this is right here in the United States of America, the one place that these things should never occur.
Kelly gained national attention after battling both the board of supervisors and the school board of a community just 28 miles southwest of Tucson. That battle and the time since have led to a family losing almost everything, to include family members who walked away from them over what they were doing.
Kelly spoke to Law Enforcement Today to share his first-hand account of what has been transpiring over the past four years.
In 2017, Kelly and his wife relocated their family from Oregon to Arizona, mainly to get away from the progressive, left-wing politics that was becoming the trend in the northwest. Shortly before the pandemic started, they opened a coffee shop, the Viva Coffee House.
Then the world came to a screeching halt. That's when the trouble started.
Shortly after lockdowns were being implemented across the country, Kelly started receiving calls to the shop. People were making threats. And they had no idea why.
Some customers started sending him screenshots that troubled him. Their family-owned coffee shop was highlighted on the Pima County website. They were posted on the county’s “Wall of shame.”
That was a site the county set up to identify businesses that were supposedly non-compliant with the lockdown procedures introduced by the county.
Kelly reached out to the Pima County Board of Supervisors via email, saying that they were wrongly listed as non-compliant and that he and his family had started receiving death threats. One of the members of the Board invited Kelly to come to the next meeting to discuss the issue.
He was going to be allowed to speak for three minutes during the public comment section.
He began his time by reading some of the foul and vulgar things being said to him, his wife, and children.
Thirty seconds into his comments, he was surrounded by three sheriff’s deputies. As he continued to speak, his hands were placed behind, he was cuffed, and led away. He was booked for disorderly conduct.
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In the days following the board meeting, the coffee house became a hot spot of people lined up to show their support, including members of law enforcement who were grateful that some one was standing up “to the madness and tyranny.”
“I even had one officer from the sheriff’s office come in and say, ‘I would have quit my job before I would have made that arrest,’” Kelly said. “They all know it was corrupt.”
The next day, the sheriff stopped by, likely to do some PR repair.
“’Just came to check on you, make sure you are ok.’ But he never said that his officers acted appropriately,” Kelly recalls.
In fact, the sheriff posted about the interactions on his social media before the case ever went to trial, which it never did.
Kelly said his attorney sent a notice of complaint to the county, naming 18 different people with fourteen violations of state, federal and constitutional laws.
“He put forth a settlement offer of $2 million for everything we had been through," he said. "The caveat that came back from the county (for the settlement) came with a gag order. We wouldn’t be able to discuss what happened. We wouldn’t be able to fight for other people who might be in the same position. My wife and I agreed and sat down with the lawyer and turned it down.”
Given everything that has transpired with their business (keep reading), that was a tough decision. They could have really used that money.
So, the county used a $2 million settlement amount was their admission of guilt. They were willing to pay Kelly a large sum of money to keep his mouth shut.
Thankfully, Kelly and his wife decided that letting the county buy their silence was not an option.
Throughout this entire time, the business was getting throttled with fake negative reviews. They also continued to receive threats.
“You can imagine how it feels to not want your kids to play out front because somebody's threatened to murder them?”
So, what motivates them to keep going?
“My wife jokingly says that I’m a remarkably, breathtakingly stubborn person,” Kelly told us. “But first and foremost, she is very supportive.”
Kelly was about to need all the support he could get. The assault on both his family and his business was just getting started. But so was the prayer and encouragement from many in the community.
“After that first arrest, when people were coming in the door, it was overwhelming and I've never had an experience like it in my life, because all day long for three or four days, people were streaming in. People were praying over me. People were telling me their stories and weeping and crying and dropping money on the table to help with our legal defense, and I just felt such love for those people.”
Because of that outpouring of support, Kelly felt the need to be there at the coffee house, all the time.
“I was only getting about three hours of sleep a night. And under all of this stress, I had never been arrested before, I literally fell asleep in the coffee shop one day, standing on my feet. I was talking in my sleep, and there were people there that said ‘we gotta get him out of here, he needs some rest.’”
The events over that first week had taken a toll on him, mentally, emotionally and physically. But God was about to work through him spiritually.
“I had fallen on my knees in the restroom of the shop and just told God, ‘I love my country and I love these people. I’ll do whatever it takes to help them. You just tell me what I need to do.’”
Isaiah 6:8 says, “Then I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, ‘Whom shall I send, and who will go for Us?’ Then I said, ‘Here am I. Send me!’”
That encounter on the floor of a coffee shop’s bathroom floor was Kelly’s Isaiah 6:8 moment.
He likened it to a scene from the movie Hacksaw Ridge.
“We're watching as these people are running into Japanese machine gunfire, watching their buddies get blown up in sawn in half by machine gunfire. And then the next day they get up and do it again. And I thought, who am I to back off from this when people have gone through that for my freedom, have given their lives for our freedom? Am I going to go back to comfort? Am I going to hide from this?”
Just in case he needed further confirmation from the Lord, Kelly told us a story of another encounter that occurred right after his arrest.
“I had just come back to the coffee shop in shock. The only other person in the place was a barista in the back washing dishes. And in walks Christa Reynolds.”
Christa was an 80-year-old woman who was born and raised in Nazi Germany Berlin during World War II. She wrote a book called Born To War as a memoir of what life was like for a child who only knew war.
“She walked up to me and said she was sorry. She was concerned about me. She said ‘Kelly, I'm so afraid. This is just what it was like when I was a little girl.’ I stood up and I put my arms around her. And I said, ‘Christa, you're never going to go through that again as long as there are men like me in the world.’”
Christa passed away in 2022, but Kelly still points to that conversation.
“I intend to keep this promise. But I don’t have the courage for this. It's gotta be God, because there have been so many times where I have just been at my end, done lost hope, having severe anxiety.”
Little did he know what God had in store for him.
The coffee house became a gathering place of like-minded people who hold the values of individual freedoms and a strong adherence to Constitutional rights. And Kelly became a voice for many in the community.
His adventures with tyrannical government officials were far from over.
As the pandemic mandates continued in various ways across the country, people were still flocking the Viva, “because it was like the hub of freedom.”
Roughly a year into the Covid nightmare, the school district started trying to strong-arm parents into vaccinating their children and forcing kids to wear masks. But Arizona has parental rights statutes in place. They have the right to make religious and medical decisions for their children. There were no legal caveats that allowed the school district to supersede parental choices.
People would come into the shop and tell Kelly stories of how the mandates being enforced by the district was leading to depression in many students, several of whom committed suicide.
During one of the shop’s Freedom Talks, everyone in attendance decided that they were going to attend the next school board meeting to address the school board of their draconian policies.
“A 16-year-old boy, who had lost a good friend to suicide, was going to attend and read a speech to the board. That young man told his principle, ‘You cannot legally make me wear a mask. There is no mandate.’”
We have told the story of many parents around the country and their battle with their local school boards. Kelly’s story was one of the first in the country.
“So, on April 27th, 2021, some people called this school board meeting the shot that was heard around the world for all the school board meetings where parents began to show up in droves.”
Kelly put on a suit and arrived at the meeting. He went and stood in front of the media, not because he wanted the attention, but because he knew that once the media has you in their sights, you become a target.
He and his family had already become victims to that, and he wanted to shield has many of these parents from that as possible.
So, he took the lead to move into the meeting. They were told they could not enter without a mask.
Kelly responded that they could not be denied access to a public meeting over enforcement of something that was not a law.
The media captured that and ran the headlines as though Kelly and the group barged into a place where they were unwelcome.
The district had designated some side rooms for overflow and forced them to go into those rooms equipped with video monitors.
“So, that was a lie right there that I barged my way in because I was literally saying, excuse me and we went and sat in the room with video monitors. But so many parents showed up, they tried to cancel the meeting.
They did not want this information to get out, right?”
They started telling people that they needed to leave.
“I said, ‘my feet are rooted like an oak tree to this floor, and you are going to let those people into speak.’ Nothing hostile. Nothing violent.”
Kelly stated that the Pima County Sheriff’s Department (PCSD) officers in attendance acted exquisitely.
SIDE NOTE: It was shortly after the board meeting that a Lieutenant with the PCSD informed Kelly that someone “high up” had reached to him asking for the department to watch Kelly, profile him and pay special attention to him. That Lieutenant responded to the odd request by stating, ‘This isn’t the Soviet Union.’ Months later, it was revealed to Kelly that the request had come from none other than Vail School District Superintendent, John Carruth.
“They identified me because I had a platform, demonized me, tried to sway the law enforcement to look at me a certain way, and then the media. (They) crucified me for going. Once we came in and we were the first ones in and established that these people need to be heard, I told the guys that were with me, I said this is our time to exit because this isn't about us or me, it’s about them. So, we exited the building.”
After the meeting, the superintendent took a message to the public that the parents opposing the board were thugs and some came to the board meeting armed. He portrayed them all as violent thugs.
Fast forward roughly 5 days. Mesquite Elementary School is just down the street from the shop.
“A school mom there came to me, came to our coffee shop, and I came in and she was sitting at one of our round tables, crying, weeping. I put my arm around her and asked, ‘What’s wrong?’ She said, ‘they’ve quarantined my son. They’re trying to force him to wear a mask.’”
Then he got a desperate call from another father.
“He said, ‘I need you come out here (the school), Kelly, because my son has just been abused. I need you to come here and witness what's happening and keep me calm.’ So, I texted another father to meet us, so we had more witnesses.”
They went, not knowing what to expect. Was this child abused? What would they find when they got there?
“We didn’t have time to try to figure it out because this dad was in such a panic,” Kelly said.
Upon arrival, they discovered that they were quarantining the student, who had no symptoms of COVID, because he wasn’t wearing a mask. They were attempting to force him to wear one. The youngster threw the mask in the trash in the nurse’s office. They made him retrieve it from the trash and put it on his face.
The father called Tucson police and asked them to come out because his child was being abused. He explained the situation and said that is child abuse. The officer on the phone agreed but refused to send someone out as it was too controversial.
“I also called state Senator Kelly Townsend, state senator at the time, and I was trying to get advice for the dad and Senator Townsend recommended that he get documentation as to why they were quarantining his child, which was another 10 days of missed school on top of one or two other times they had quarantined, have him get that information and then leave.
So, that’s exactly what I advised the dad to do. Once he got it, we left.”
The entire exchange is captured on video.
The superintendent sent out an email the next day to district staff. It said, “that the situation was resolved peacefully, and the learning environment was not disrupted.”
“And that is key,” Kelly said. “But what did they do again? Instead of having a meeting or addressing these issues or saying, ‘you know what, the welfare of the child, was he abused?’”
No. Instead, instead, they went on a media tour.
“Diane Vargo, the principal, went on the shows weeping, ‘Oh, I was so scared.’ You watch the tape, she wasn’t scared.”
This led to Kelly and the other dads receiving threats.
“We're getting very serious death threats mailed to our houses, like, ‘I am going to come to your house and zip-tie your wife. You’re gonna watch me rape your wife and kill your children in front of you.’
The FBI did nothing. Local law enforcement did nothing.”
Three days later, the fallout from the meeting at Mesquite Elementary escalated.
“We're watching a movie and having popcorn. Five police officers come to my house and deliver a paper ticket for misdemeanor 3 trespassing, which is literally somewhere between a parking ticket and loitering in severity misdemeanor 3 trespassing.”
Kelly asked what the cause was for this citation. The officers at the door could not answer the question.
“One officer said, ‘Look, I am in charge here. You’re going to sign that or you’re going to go to jail.’”
This interaction is also on video.
“I continued to ask what law I had broken to warrant this ticket,” Kelly said.
Kelly said he was told that one of the dads had zip ties with him. He also pointed out that they were there due to a report of child abuse and citizen’s arrests are technically legal in Arizona.
“I said, ‘OK, but it wasn’t me. And he never used them or threatened to use them. No one brought them up. Nobody said, ‘hey, what are those for?’ Would it have been wise for him to put them in the car or leave them outside? Sure. But no attempts were made.”
So, he signed the ticket.
The next thing Kelly sees is his name and picture plastered all over media outlets like CNN, NBC, Daily Mail, and others. All were claiming a false narrative that Kelly went in there and threatened to arrest and kidnap the principal and that he attempted to do so.
Again, the entire interaction was captured on video.
The reality, none of what was accused happened.
All three dads were represented by the same attorney but were given separate trials.
At the first trial, the judge watched the video and commented, “what struck me was you guys didn't stand up because you're big, your size would have been a factor. But you didn’t yell, you didn’t cuss.”
“This is a paraphrase, but he said, ‘all you did was disagree with the principal’ and then he looked at the principal, the Superintendent, because a bunch of staff would go to every one of these things, he said, ‘and they get to disagree with you, and you don't get to tell them how.
He knows we didn’t do anything. He said, ‘You weren’t violent. That’s not disorderly conduct.’”
Kelly believed that ruling would bide well for the other two trials.
The dad with the zip-ties was given a plea deal, resulting in a $250 fine and one year of unsupervised probation. The other dad received a larger fine, which he is appealing.
So, what was the result of Kelly’s trial.
“I got 100 days in jail and $10,000 in fines for sitting in the office.”
During his trial, Kelly’s attorney had the principal on the stand where she admitted that Kelly had done nothing menacing, didn’t yell, use profanity, make threats or anything of a threatening nature.
The prosecutor then asked her if she felt that he could have been violent.
“Isn’t he a big, scary man?” was one of the questions asked.
The prosecutor’s entire assertion was that the atmosphere changed after Kelly came in the room.
They added three additional misdemeanors to his charges, including disrupting a learning environment.
We point back to the email sent by Superintendent Carruth stating that everything was resolved peacefully, and it had no negative impact on the learning environment. He even posted to social media saying there was no disruption.
When the defense attorney brought this up in court, the judge ruled it inadmissible.
“She just threw it out. That was an admission of my innocence right there.”
His lawyer told him that there were all misdemeanor charges and there would likely be no sentencing.
The judge told him they would hold a sentence hearing and that he would be facing jail time.
“For talking, for advocating for a child, for pointing out that kids are committing suicide because of these policies?”
So, they decided to appeal.
While all of this was going on, the Walkers decided to sell their home in Tucson. When they went to close, they were told there was a $10,000 lien on the property by Pima County. Their attorney fired back that they could not enforce that lien, under the Arizona Homesteading Act, unless the property had at least $250,000 in equity.
The county’s response?
“We don’t care. We do not consider the Walker’s home their homestead.”
Not their homestead?
“Our home where we had our family, where we had backyard chickens and a garden? That’s not our homestead? We spent $3,000 fighting to be able close on our home sell. Thank God that finally went through, minus the lien amount.
At the same time, the law firm representing us told us they would need a $10,000 retainer.”
The same amount the county just stole from them, making it effectively impossible to appeal the verdict.
This timing all coincided with them basically being forced to shut down their bussiness. So, now they are search of a home and income.
And, as Kelly said, the plot thickens.
US Attorney General Merrick Garland, in conjunction with the National School Board Association, weaponized the FBI to start going after law-abiding American parents for their efforts to stand up to tyrannical school boards.
After getting ahold of some FOIA documents, it became abundantly obvious that the genesis of NSBA letter to the AG was the school board meeting at Vail School District and the so-called attack on Mesquite Elementary.
“My name was all over it. Not literally my name, but there's only one person who was seen as the leader or instigator of the school board meeting. There's only one person who was treated severely, punished for that Mesquite incident, and it's me. So literally, I bore the brunt of the NSBA, the Biden administration, the federal government, and now we know why the FBI was involved. Now we know why 15 Tucson police officers were assigned to this. Now we know why I was so harshly penalized because it was all political.”
But through all of this, Kelly and his family have not stopped fighting for themselves or other people.
“I've been traveling and meeting people and setting all these things up and telling this story because I told parents I promised them when they came to us, I will fight for you,” he told us in closing.
Kelly is being the man that he promised Christa Reynolds he would be.
For anyone who wants to help his family and their fight can visit their fundraising campaign.
He reached out to a member of Congress, who now has their office investigating the Vail Public School District as well as their board.
But he didn’t stop there. Kelly is sharing his story far and wide in hopes of preventing other American parents from having to deal with what his family has had to walk through.
He has also released a video series about parenting with conservative values and Godly character in today’s world. It is called Fathering In A World Gone Mad.
To learn more about the man behind the fight, please visit his website.
You can also check out his appearance on the Eric Metaxas Show.
Kelly gained national attention after battling both the board of supervisors and the school board of a community just 28 miles southwest of Tucson. That battle and the time since have led to a family losing almost everything, to include family members who walked away from them over what they were doing.
Kelly spoke to Law Enforcement Today to share his first-hand account of what has been transpiring over the past four years.
In 2017, Kelly and his wife relocated their family from Oregon to Arizona, mainly to get away from the progressive, left-wing politics that was becoming the trend in the northwest. Shortly before the pandemic started, they opened a coffee shop, the Viva Coffee House.
Then the world came to a screeching halt. That's when the trouble started.
Shortly after lockdowns were being implemented across the country, Kelly started receiving calls to the shop. People were making threats. And they had no idea why.
Some customers started sending him screenshots that troubled him. Their family-owned coffee shop was highlighted on the Pima County website. They were posted on the county’s “Wall of shame.”
That was a site the county set up to identify businesses that were supposedly non-compliant with the lockdown procedures introduced by the county.
Kelly reached out to the Pima County Board of Supervisors via email, saying that they were wrongly listed as non-compliant and that he and his family had started receiving death threats. One of the members of the Board invited Kelly to come to the next meeting to discuss the issue.
He was going to be allowed to speak for three minutes during the public comment section.
He began his time by reading some of the foul and vulgar things being said to him, his wife, and children.
Thirty seconds into his comments, he was surrounded by three sheriff’s deputies. As he continued to speak, his hands were placed behind, he was cuffed, and led away. He was booked for disorderly conduct.
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In the days following the board meeting, the coffee house became a hot spot of people lined up to show their support, including members of law enforcement who were grateful that some one was standing up “to the madness and tyranny.”
“I even had one officer from the sheriff’s office come in and say, ‘I would have quit my job before I would have made that arrest,’” Kelly said. “They all know it was corrupt.”
The next day, the sheriff stopped by, likely to do some PR repair.
“’Just came to check on you, make sure you are ok.’ But he never said that his officers acted appropriately,” Kelly recalls.
In fact, the sheriff posted about the interactions on his social media before the case ever went to trial, which it never did.
Kelly said his attorney sent a notice of complaint to the county, naming 18 different people with fourteen violations of state, federal and constitutional laws.
“He put forth a settlement offer of $2 million for everything we had been through," he said. "The caveat that came back from the county (for the settlement) came with a gag order. We wouldn’t be able to discuss what happened. We wouldn’t be able to fight for other people who might be in the same position. My wife and I agreed and sat down with the lawyer and turned it down.”
Given everything that has transpired with their business (keep reading), that was a tough decision. They could have really used that money.
So, the county used a $2 million settlement amount was their admission of guilt. They were willing to pay Kelly a large sum of money to keep his mouth shut.
Thankfully, Kelly and his wife decided that letting the county buy their silence was not an option.
Throughout this entire time, the business was getting throttled with fake negative reviews. They also continued to receive threats.
“You can imagine how it feels to not want your kids to play out front because somebody's threatened to murder them?”
So, what motivates them to keep going?
“My wife jokingly says that I’m a remarkably, breathtakingly stubborn person,” Kelly told us. “But first and foremost, she is very supportive.”
Kelly was about to need all the support he could get. The assault on both his family and his business was just getting started. But so was the prayer and encouragement from many in the community.
“After that first arrest, when people were coming in the door, it was overwhelming and I've never had an experience like it in my life, because all day long for three or four days, people were streaming in. People were praying over me. People were telling me their stories and weeping and crying and dropping money on the table to help with our legal defense, and I just felt such love for those people.”
Because of that outpouring of support, Kelly felt the need to be there at the coffee house, all the time.
“I was only getting about three hours of sleep a night. And under all of this stress, I had never been arrested before, I literally fell asleep in the coffee shop one day, standing on my feet. I was talking in my sleep, and there were people there that said ‘we gotta get him out of here, he needs some rest.’”
The events over that first week had taken a toll on him, mentally, emotionally and physically. But God was about to work through him spiritually.
“I had fallen on my knees in the restroom of the shop and just told God, ‘I love my country and I love these people. I’ll do whatever it takes to help them. You just tell me what I need to do.’”
Isaiah 6:8 says, “Then I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, ‘Whom shall I send, and who will go for Us?’ Then I said, ‘Here am I. Send me!’”
That encounter on the floor of a coffee shop’s bathroom floor was Kelly’s Isaiah 6:8 moment.
He likened it to a scene from the movie Hacksaw Ridge.
“We're watching as these people are running into Japanese machine gunfire, watching their buddies get blown up in sawn in half by machine gunfire. And then the next day they get up and do it again. And I thought, who am I to back off from this when people have gone through that for my freedom, have given their lives for our freedom? Am I going to go back to comfort? Am I going to hide from this?”
Just in case he needed further confirmation from the Lord, Kelly told us a story of another encounter that occurred right after his arrest.
“I had just come back to the coffee shop in shock. The only other person in the place was a barista in the back washing dishes. And in walks Christa Reynolds.”
Christa was an 80-year-old woman who was born and raised in Nazi Germany Berlin during World War II. She wrote a book called Born To War as a memoir of what life was like for a child who only knew war.
“She walked up to me and said she was sorry. She was concerned about me. She said ‘Kelly, I'm so afraid. This is just what it was like when I was a little girl.’ I stood up and I put my arms around her. And I said, ‘Christa, you're never going to go through that again as long as there are men like me in the world.’”
Christa passed away in 2022, but Kelly still points to that conversation.
“I intend to keep this promise. But I don’t have the courage for this. It's gotta be God, because there have been so many times where I have just been at my end, done lost hope, having severe anxiety.”
Little did he know what God had in store for him.
The coffee house became a gathering place of like-minded people who hold the values of individual freedoms and a strong adherence to Constitutional rights. And Kelly became a voice for many in the community.
His adventures with tyrannical government officials were far from over.
As the pandemic mandates continued in various ways across the country, people were still flocking the Viva, “because it was like the hub of freedom.”
Roughly a year into the Covid nightmare, the school district started trying to strong-arm parents into vaccinating their children and forcing kids to wear masks. But Arizona has parental rights statutes in place. They have the right to make religious and medical decisions for their children. There were no legal caveats that allowed the school district to supersede parental choices.
People would come into the shop and tell Kelly stories of how the mandates being enforced by the district was leading to depression in many students, several of whom committed suicide.
During one of the shop’s Freedom Talks, everyone in attendance decided that they were going to attend the next school board meeting to address the school board of their draconian policies.
“A 16-year-old boy, who had lost a good friend to suicide, was going to attend and read a speech to the board. That young man told his principle, ‘You cannot legally make me wear a mask. There is no mandate.’”
We have told the story of many parents around the country and their battle with their local school boards. Kelly’s story was one of the first in the country.
“So, on April 27th, 2021, some people called this school board meeting the shot that was heard around the world for all the school board meetings where parents began to show up in droves.”
Kelly put on a suit and arrived at the meeting. He went and stood in front of the media, not because he wanted the attention, but because he knew that once the media has you in their sights, you become a target.
He and his family had already become victims to that, and he wanted to shield has many of these parents from that as possible.
So, he took the lead to move into the meeting. They were told they could not enter without a mask.
Kelly responded that they could not be denied access to a public meeting over enforcement of something that was not a law.
The media captured that and ran the headlines as though Kelly and the group barged into a place where they were unwelcome.
The district had designated some side rooms for overflow and forced them to go into those rooms equipped with video monitors.
“So, that was a lie right there that I barged my way in because I was literally saying, excuse me and we went and sat in the room with video monitors. But so many parents showed up, they tried to cancel the meeting.
They did not want this information to get out, right?”
They started telling people that they needed to leave.
“I said, ‘my feet are rooted like an oak tree to this floor, and you are going to let those people into speak.’ Nothing hostile. Nothing violent.”
Kelly stated that the Pima County Sheriff’s Department (PCSD) officers in attendance acted exquisitely.
SIDE NOTE: It was shortly after the board meeting that a Lieutenant with the PCSD informed Kelly that someone “high up” had reached to him asking for the department to watch Kelly, profile him and pay special attention to him. That Lieutenant responded to the odd request by stating, ‘This isn’t the Soviet Union.’ Months later, it was revealed to Kelly that the request had come from none other than Vail School District Superintendent, John Carruth.
“They identified me because I had a platform, demonized me, tried to sway the law enforcement to look at me a certain way, and then the media. (They) crucified me for going. Once we came in and we were the first ones in and established that these people need to be heard, I told the guys that were with me, I said this is our time to exit because this isn't about us or me, it’s about them. So, we exited the building.”
After the meeting, the superintendent took a message to the public that the parents opposing the board were thugs and some came to the board meeting armed. He portrayed them all as violent thugs.
Fast forward roughly 5 days. Mesquite Elementary School is just down the street from the shop.
“A school mom there came to me, came to our coffee shop, and I came in and she was sitting at one of our round tables, crying, weeping. I put my arm around her and asked, ‘What’s wrong?’ She said, ‘they’ve quarantined my son. They’re trying to force him to wear a mask.’”
Then he got a desperate call from another father.
“He said, ‘I need you come out here (the school), Kelly, because my son has just been abused. I need you to come here and witness what's happening and keep me calm.’ So, I texted another father to meet us, so we had more witnesses.”
They went, not knowing what to expect. Was this child abused? What would they find when they got there?
“We didn’t have time to try to figure it out because this dad was in such a panic,” Kelly said.
Upon arrival, they discovered that they were quarantining the student, who had no symptoms of COVID, because he wasn’t wearing a mask. They were attempting to force him to wear one. The youngster threw the mask in the trash in the nurse’s office. They made him retrieve it from the trash and put it on his face.
The father called Tucson police and asked them to come out because his child was being abused. He explained the situation and said that is child abuse. The officer on the phone agreed but refused to send someone out as it was too controversial.
“I also called state Senator Kelly Townsend, state senator at the time, and I was trying to get advice for the dad and Senator Townsend recommended that he get documentation as to why they were quarantining his child, which was another 10 days of missed school on top of one or two other times they had quarantined, have him get that information and then leave.
So, that’s exactly what I advised the dad to do. Once he got it, we left.”
The entire exchange is captured on video.
The superintendent sent out an email the next day to district staff. It said, “that the situation was resolved peacefully, and the learning environment was not disrupted.”
“And that is key,” Kelly said. “But what did they do again? Instead of having a meeting or addressing these issues or saying, ‘you know what, the welfare of the child, was he abused?’”
No. Instead, instead, they went on a media tour.
“Diane Vargo, the principal, went on the shows weeping, ‘Oh, I was so scared.’ You watch the tape, she wasn’t scared.”
This led to Kelly and the other dads receiving threats.
“We're getting very serious death threats mailed to our houses, like, ‘I am going to come to your house and zip-tie your wife. You’re gonna watch me rape your wife and kill your children in front of you.’
The FBI did nothing. Local law enforcement did nothing.”
Three days later, the fallout from the meeting at Mesquite Elementary escalated.
“We're watching a movie and having popcorn. Five police officers come to my house and deliver a paper ticket for misdemeanor 3 trespassing, which is literally somewhere between a parking ticket and loitering in severity misdemeanor 3 trespassing.”
Kelly asked what the cause was for this citation. The officers at the door could not answer the question.
“One officer said, ‘Look, I am in charge here. You’re going to sign that or you’re going to go to jail.’”
This interaction is also on video.
“I continued to ask what law I had broken to warrant this ticket,” Kelly said.
Kelly said he was told that one of the dads had zip ties with him. He also pointed out that they were there due to a report of child abuse and citizen’s arrests are technically legal in Arizona.
“I said, ‘OK, but it wasn’t me. And he never used them or threatened to use them. No one brought them up. Nobody said, ‘hey, what are those for?’ Would it have been wise for him to put them in the car or leave them outside? Sure. But no attempts were made.”
So, he signed the ticket.
The next thing Kelly sees is his name and picture plastered all over media outlets like CNN, NBC, Daily Mail, and others. All were claiming a false narrative that Kelly went in there and threatened to arrest and kidnap the principal and that he attempted to do so.
Again, the entire interaction was captured on video.
The reality, none of what was accused happened.
All three dads were represented by the same attorney but were given separate trials.
At the first trial, the judge watched the video and commented, “what struck me was you guys didn't stand up because you're big, your size would have been a factor. But you didn’t yell, you didn’t cuss.”
“This is a paraphrase, but he said, ‘all you did was disagree with the principal’ and then he looked at the principal, the Superintendent, because a bunch of staff would go to every one of these things, he said, ‘and they get to disagree with you, and you don't get to tell them how.
He knows we didn’t do anything. He said, ‘You weren’t violent. That’s not disorderly conduct.’”
Kelly believed that ruling would bide well for the other two trials.
The dad with the zip-ties was given a plea deal, resulting in a $250 fine and one year of unsupervised probation. The other dad received a larger fine, which he is appealing.
So, what was the result of Kelly’s trial.
“I got 100 days in jail and $10,000 in fines for sitting in the office.”
During his trial, Kelly’s attorney had the principal on the stand where she admitted that Kelly had done nothing menacing, didn’t yell, use profanity, make threats or anything of a threatening nature.
The prosecutor then asked her if she felt that he could have been violent.
“Isn’t he a big, scary man?” was one of the questions asked.
The prosecutor’s entire assertion was that the atmosphere changed after Kelly came in the room.
They added three additional misdemeanors to his charges, including disrupting a learning environment.
We point back to the email sent by Superintendent Carruth stating that everything was resolved peacefully, and it had no negative impact on the learning environment. He even posted to social media saying there was no disruption.
When the defense attorney brought this up in court, the judge ruled it inadmissible.
“She just threw it out. That was an admission of my innocence right there.”
His lawyer told him that there were all misdemeanor charges and there would likely be no sentencing.
The judge told him they would hold a sentence hearing and that he would be facing jail time.
“For talking, for advocating for a child, for pointing out that kids are committing suicide because of these policies?”
So, they decided to appeal.
While all of this was going on, the Walkers decided to sell their home in Tucson. When they went to close, they were told there was a $10,000 lien on the property by Pima County. Their attorney fired back that they could not enforce that lien, under the Arizona Homesteading Act, unless the property had at least $250,000 in equity.
The county’s response?
“We don’t care. We do not consider the Walker’s home their homestead.”
Not their homestead?
“Our home where we had our family, where we had backyard chickens and a garden? That’s not our homestead? We spent $3,000 fighting to be able close on our home sell. Thank God that finally went through, minus the lien amount.
At the same time, the law firm representing us told us they would need a $10,000 retainer.”
The same amount the county just stole from them, making it effectively impossible to appeal the verdict.
This timing all coincided with them basically being forced to shut down their bussiness. So, now they are search of a home and income.
And, as Kelly said, the plot thickens.
US Attorney General Merrick Garland, in conjunction with the National School Board Association, weaponized the FBI to start going after law-abiding American parents for their efforts to stand up to tyrannical school boards.
After getting ahold of some FOIA documents, it became abundantly obvious that the genesis of NSBA letter to the AG was the school board meeting at Vail School District and the so-called attack on Mesquite Elementary.
“My name was all over it. Not literally my name, but there's only one person who was seen as the leader or instigator of the school board meeting. There's only one person who was treated severely, punished for that Mesquite incident, and it's me. So literally, I bore the brunt of the NSBA, the Biden administration, the federal government, and now we know why the FBI was involved. Now we know why 15 Tucson police officers were assigned to this. Now we know why I was so harshly penalized because it was all political.”
But through all of this, Kelly and his family have not stopped fighting for themselves or other people.
“I've been traveling and meeting people and setting all these things up and telling this story because I told parents I promised them when they came to us, I will fight for you,” he told us in closing.
Kelly is being the man that he promised Christa Reynolds he would be.
For anyone who wants to help his family and their fight can visit their fundraising campaign.
He reached out to a member of Congress, who now has their office investigating the Vail Public School District as well as their board.
But he didn’t stop there. Kelly is sharing his story far and wide in hopes of preventing other American parents from having to deal with what his family has had to walk through.
He has also released a video series about parenting with conservative values and Godly character in today’s world. It is called Fathering In A World Gone Mad.
To learn more about the man behind the fight, please visit his website.
You can also check out his appearance on the Eric Metaxas Show.
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The opinions reflected in this article are not necessarily the opinions of LET
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