Las Cruces restaurant owner in legal battle with state over drive-in movie night

LAS CRUCES, New Mexico -- The owner of the Game Sports Bar & Grill on Friday told ABC-7 that she plans to take legal action after state police told her to cancel her drive-in movie night.

"We really thought this would be an amazing community event for the people of Las Cruces who are so tired of staying home," said Marci Dickerson. "There's a lot of angst in our community right now."

She had originally planned the event for Friday and Saturday nights, this weekend and next. Dickerson said all the reservations for the four nights were fully booked after only twenty minutes of accepting those.

"We certainly wanted to give them what we thought would be a very safe and entertaining alternative" to staying home, Dickerson said.

The restaurant owner told ABC-7 that she had hired security, planned for the cars to be spaced out six-feet apart and even had people on hand to sanitize the bathrooms and monitor them, to ensure only one person was in at a time.

"I really thought we were abiding by every single one of the rules," Dickerson said.

ABC-7 reached out to New Mexico State Police for comment on Thursday afternoon, but had not heard back from it as of Thursday night.

"We will postpone the movies this weekend," Dickerson said. "I'm not saying we're giving up, but we will postpone the movies this weekend and let our legal team do what they do."