In March, restaurateur Desmond Reilly closed Chicken + Whiskey at the Mall in Columbia, but promised that his two other county eateries wouldn’t be going anywhere.

They closed the next month.

Bennie’s Pizza, a newcomer at the mall offering a menu co-signed by Michelin-starred chef Gerald Addison, and The Walrus Oyster & Ale House, a seven-year veteran that recently attempted to revitalize the business with a new, more French menu, both permanently shut their doors at 10300 Little Patuxent Parkway.

It felt like a long time coming for Reilly, who claims that both the mall and Howard County leaders’ failure to address a rise in crime ultimately forced his hand, an assertion mall management and county officials vehemently dispute and crime statistics don’t necessarily back up.

“Now that I’m completely gone from Columbia, I can be honest… The Mall in Columbia has become a different world,” said Reilly, a Howard County resident. “It wasn’t the world we signed up for or a world we could make money in.”

Reilly, who is managing principal of the Washington, D.C.-based SRG Concept restaurant group, says the shopping center changed “dramatically” in the last few years. He alleged that starting in March 2023, he noticed more fights between young people in front of Bennie’s. People were afraid to go to the mall’s restaurants, he said, adding that the cover count, or customers served, at his Walrus Oyster & Ale House business fell that year by 25%.

The decline allegedly continued into 2024 by another 20%, and by 2025, Reilly said the number of customers served at the Walrus had fallen by a cumulative 60%.

A public portal tracking offenses in Columbia’s Town Center, which includes the mall, does not show crime consistently trending up or down. In 2023, the number of reported offenses hit its lowest point in March and a peak in April, around the same timeline Reilly alleges noticing crime at the mall getting out of hand. In 2024, offenses hit a zenith in June, when there were 23 reported offenses and seven reported assaults in the area. In July of that year, there was a homicide in the food court bathroom, where 17-year-old Angelo Little was fatally shot.

Reilly remembers the shooting well, but claims the mall did little to encourage fearful customers into coming back to the area. “It became clear that people in Howard County don’t feel safe at the mall,” he said, adding that he was discouraged by the mall’s lack of effort to relay that it was safe to return to restaurants.

He was also discouraged by the lack of a town hall or other communication by county leadership to address adolescent crime and encourage people to patronize local businesses. This “silence” continued following the recent fatal double shooting of 16-year-old Michael Robertson and Blake McCray in the mall’s bus loop area in February 2025, according to Reilly.

Lindsay Kahn, a spokeswoman for Brooksfield Property Management, which is the landlord of the mall, including Reilly’s restaurants, said it was unfortunate and misleading to blame crime and the mall’s inaction for the closures, especially after several months of negotiations between the groups were spent to determine a path forward for the restaurants.

“We have always maintained a robust and comprehensive security program that is visible to the public and behind the scenes,” Kahn said.

Safa Hira, director of communications for Howard County Government, said their team was working with several businesses to address safety concerns, but did not have any record of Reilly lodging a complaint.

Hira added that a full-time, permanent unit of officers was recently stationed in an area that included the Merriweather District, the Columbia Lakefront and the Mall in Columbia. A satellite office will be coming to the mall in the coming months, she said, and an additional beat was set up for a 24-hour patrol.

Since the plan was enacted, no reports of gun crimes or shooting incidents have been reported in the area.

Lori Boone, a spokeswoman with the Howard County Police Department, said the new beat was an operational decision made by police and not initiated as a result of requests by the mall or other businesses.

Reilly says his businesses suffered more than most from people’s fear of crime at the Mall in Columbia because, unlike the Cheesecake Factory or other franchises, he and his two other partners had to independently foot the bill for losses month to month. It was what the mall initially liked about SRG Concepts, he said: They recruited him to the mall because the group promised new, innovative concepts run by a local company instead of a national chain.

“We thought it was flattering to be the little guy,” he said.

Reilly’s concepts appeared to flourish outside of Columbia, including a Walrus branch in the National Harbor and a Chicken + Whiskey on 14th Street Northwest in D.C.

And while crime has also been an issue around Chicken + Whiskey’s D.C location, Reilly says audiences there aren’t deterred by it in the same way.

“When you are in a city of 700,000 people, there’s an acceptable tolerance people have [for crime],” he said. “But in Howard County, tolerance for this crime is zero. ... It’s very different in the suburbs that claim safety.”

After the death of Little, Reilly said he messaged Brookfield Properties for more information and wanted to see more action taken to signal crime was being taken seriously. But responses were limited and centered around status updates on the police investigation, he alleged.

“Our landlord and local leaders wanted to sweep it all under the carpet,” he said. “They self-identify as a town center, a community nexus point, so why is there no community messaging?”

Reilly declined to show The Banner these messages and said that despite his concerns, he did not reach out to county leadership about addressing crime because he wanted to keep politics away from his eateries.

Two other business owners at the Mall in Columbia, who declined to be named for fear of upsetting their landlord, echoed some of his concerns.

An employee of one restaurant, which, like Reilly’s, is an independent operation, said crime has made it more difficult to attract more “affluent” audiences to the mall. Another mall restaurant owner said customers were growing more and more afraid of the mall and not enough was being done. He added that even the 6 p.m. curfew, which was added to address adolescent violence, cut off some of his customers from coming in the evening. He said his restaurant would not be renewing their lease with the development.

Chad Gauss, who owns The Food Market in Columbia and Vacation, which directly faces the mall, said though he has seen a small dip in diners, he attributed it to the “additional 500-plus seats being added to the Merriweather District. There’s only so many dining dollars.”

He added that “there have been individual issues in Columbia Mall from time to time, but we find it to be extremely safe in the area,” calling it a “fun, family-friendly market.”

But concerns over adolescent crime are not new. In 2014, a mass shooting in the mall wreaked havoc on customers’ perceptions of safety. Reilly admitted he doesn’t see Columbia as an isolated case, but a symptom of a larger “American problem.”

While Bennie’s was not around long enough to evaluate whether crime brought about its downfall, he said, he remains confident that crime is to blame for the Walrus closure, despite the restaurant enduring other struggles during its tenure.

Reilly said he’ll be spending the coming months searching for jobs for the 81 people who were laid off from his restaurants in the last two months. He remains skeptical of the actions taken to address crime, calling heavy police “in the suburban world” more of a deterrent to customers than crime.

But he’s not leaving the mall with any regrets. Reilly feels it’s only right for him to share the concerns he says are held by many in the business community.

“My wife and kids eat in the food court where a boy was murdered in the bathroom,” he said. “Does someone need more understanding than that?”