U.S. flag vanishes from sheriff’s office. Suspect: ‘I was drunk and I like flags.’

The American flag that usually flies over the old Sears building in downtown Macon was gone Monday morning.

Bibb County sheriff’s deputy Nathan T. Sprague, who works there at Third Street and Riverside Drive in what is now a law enforcement annex for investigators, was the one who noticed Old Glory’s absence.

Sprague soon learned that the sheriff’s star-spangled banner had been stolen in the night.

With the Fourth of July barely a week away, such malfeasance was a near-treasonous offense.

The cops watched footage from a security camera.

Here’s what they saw: A bearded figure, an older fellow in a black cap and dark tanktop, lighting a cigarette near the flagpole.

It was going on 12:30 a.m. when a shadow — the flag itself — slid into view. Someone was lowering it to the sidewalk.

Deputy Sprague, according to a sheriff’s write-up of the episode, recognized the suspect as a homeless man named “Ghost.”

The man appeared to have stuffed the $250 flag into a trash bag. He walked off with the bag slung over his shoulder.

By noon Tuesday, the cops had tracked him down. He was sitting in the water at the edge of the Ocmulgee River a few blocks from the scene of the crime.

The suspect was soon identified as 61-year-old Joseph Talmadge Schrader. Originally from southeast Georgia, he has been in and out of prison four times since the middle 1990s. Over the years he has been convicted of burglary, criminal damage and theft.

Under the Spring Street bridge where he had been staying, the lawmen found a pizza delivery bag on the ground. Inside the pizza bag was a trash bag. And inside the trash bag was the sheriff’s department’s American flag.

Schrader was jailed on a misdemeanor theft-by-taking charge. He was still in the county lockup Wednesday evening in lieu of $650 bond.

As it turned out, the deputies’ write-up noted, there was another flag in Schrader’s trash bag, one bearing stars and bars. But there were no reports of a rebel flag being stolen.

The cops say Schrader admitted stealing the American flag. He told them he was going to hang it under the bridge.

“I was drunk,” he reportedly told them, “and I like flags.”

This story was originally published June 28, 2017 at 5:09 PM with the headline "U.S. flag vanishes from sheriff’s office. Suspect: ‘I was drunk and I like flags.’."