He says he made her breakfast, then she set his house on fire

The house fire was out, the brick-flinging woman who set it was gone, and the man who’d made her breakfast could only shake his head.

The blaze started about noon Saturday at an ocean-blue, wood-sided house that overlooks First Avenue. Built in 1910, it sits up an embankment from the Hardeman Avenue off-ramp above Interstate 75 in Macon’s Pleasant Hill neighborhood.

The place was still smoking when Aaron Whitfield, who lives there, told a reporter that he had asked a female friend to leave.

Police, meanwhile, scoured the neighborhood trying to find the woman, whose name wasn’t divulged.

Whitfield said he made her something to eat. “She was tired and hungry,” he said. Then he told her he was going to clean his room.

“And she got mad,” he said, “because I asked her to leave.”

She refused, so Whitfield put her out. Then a brick sailed through a window at the back door.

“I heard glass break,” Whitfield said. “Then she said, ‘I’m gonna set this mother (expletive) on fire!’ And next thing I know, the back porch was on fire. ... I don’t know how.”

Whitfield grabbed a garden hose to fight the flames. The woman, armed with a box cutter, thwarted his efforts.

“She was cutting holes in the water hose,” he said, “so I couldn’t put the fire out.”

Smoke filled the house. Another man who lives there crawled out a window. No one was hurt, and the fire didn’t spread past the kitchen.

Whitfield’s sister owns the house, and he said, “She’s gonna be mad.”

Though perhaps not as angry as the woman who tried to torch the place.

Whitfield, standing in the front yard in a T-shirt and plaid pajama pants, just shook his head.

“I mean, I just gave her breakfast,” he said. “I mean, why you want to do that?”

This story was originally published December 10, 2016 at 4:10 PM with the headline "He says he made her breakfast, then she set his house on fire."