Macon man 'trapped' in apartment can't pick lock with butter knife

There was a clinking sound. A Bibb County sheriff’s deputy heard it as he walked toward an apartment on a recent Saturday night. It was late, after 11 p.m., and the deputy had been sent to check on a man who, according to emergency dispatchers, was trapped inside his own apartment. The apartment was off Skipper Road, east of Interstate 75, between Hartley Bridge and Sardis Church roads. It wasn’t long before the deputy figured out what the clinking was. When he arrived at the man’s front door, there was a butter knife poking through a hole where the door knob had been. The door knob was on the ground outside. “I asked him what he was trying to do,” the deputy noted in his report of the Sept. 19 encounter. The man, a 67-year-old with back trouble, said he was trying to dislodge the rest of the jammed lock and open the door, which otherwise wouldn't budge. The deputy tried to help, but the door’s dead bolt was stuck in the door frame. “I asked him if he had pliers,” the deputy’s report said, “and he did not.” But as it turned out, the man wasn’t exactly trapped. The deputy’s next question was whether the apartment had another door. It did, a side door. But getting out required climbing over a ground-floor railing, and the man’s back problem made that difficult. “He came around and met me,” the deputy noted. “I asked him what happened and he said that he was unable to get any help to come ... get him out of his apartment. He removed the screws in an attempt to remove the handle to open the door and ... the handle fell to the outside.” Eventually, the report goes on, the guy’s girlfriend called the cops. The apartment’s maintenance man wasn’t available, the report said. In the end, firefighters came and pried the door open.

This story was originally published September 30, 2015 at 12:00 AM with the headline "Macon man 'trapped' in apartment can't pick lock with butter knife."