Stray roosters and a trailer park love triangle top list of 2016 oddities

Here at the Cop Shop, The Telegraph’s wildly popular digest of police report oddities, we run across plenty of bizarre happenings. As our faithful readers already know, 2016 generated its share of nutty occurrences. Today we rank the year’s five zaniest:

5. On the northern shores of Lake Sinclair, there is a country lane known as Possum Point Drive. In late February, a 65-year-old woman there dialed 911 to complain about her neighbor’s chickens. A pair of Angora roosters — “a big old red one and a big old black one,” she said — were scratching around in her flower bed. A Putnam County sheriff’s deputy sent to check on the disturbance described the flower bed as “very desolate.” Nothing was growing there. Even so, the woman who’d complained said that each spring she plants sultanas, which her mother adored. The bed lies below a bird feeder. The chickens found the scattered seeds to their liking. The deputy told the chickens’ owner to keep her roosters caged or someone might, as he put it, “turn them into fried chicken.” Later when the Cop Shop spoke to the woman who’d called the law, she said the roosters had not returned. “I hate to complain,” she said, but she had grown weary of seeing the fowl in her yard every day at sunup. “When I plant me some flowers and go out there and there’s a damn rooster,” she said, “you know what I’m gonna do with him? You’ll be invited to chicken dumplings.”

4. A man bolted when a Bibb County sheriff’s deputy cruised up about midnight on March 23. The man had been standing in the middle of Edgewood Avenue, a few blocks south of the county jail. He dashed toward a house east of Second Street. As the deputy pursued him, the deputy heard someone in the crawl space beneath a house. The deputy peered under and saw a man crouched behind some old furniture. “I instructed the subject to come (out) ... with his hands up,” the deputy noted in an incident report. The man was carrying a purse and had on what was described as “women’s lace lingerie.”

3. One night in August, someone pulled a knife on a 55-year-old man. He said he was sitting on a couch in his Atlantic Avenue home in Macon. The supposed knife wielder was a 44-year-old woman. A Bibb sheriff’s report said the man had “constantly told (the woman) to leave him alone.” But it seems she had been drinking beer, as the report put it, “all day,” and she kept “trying to take his pants and undress him in attempts to have sex with him, but he told her no multiple times.” The last time he rebuffed her, the report went on, “she went into the kitchen and grabbed a large kitchen knife and came at him.”

2. In late March, a 25-year-old man went to Waffle House to eat. He recognized a guy there. The fellow’s name was “Scrappy.” They’d been in 8th grade together. After ordering, the 25-year-old man sat down with Scrappy. He ate dinner and stood up to leave. Out of the blue, Scrappy grabbed a coffee mug and “smashed it” into the side of the 25-year-old’s face, a Bibb sheriff’s report said of the incident at the Riverside Drive eatery. “The manager … told Scrappy to leave but ‘Scrappy’ was so into fighting with (the other man) that he ignored him. The waitress on scene said that the two were just talking when Scrappy ‘spazzed out.’” The brawl ended and both men stepped outside. The 25-year-old looked at Scrappy and said, “Hey, man, what was that?” Scrappy replied, “Man, I don’t know. I see people I used to know and I just psych out on them. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

1. The man at her door was in a huff, claiming that a guy who lives nearby was his lover, not hers. Then he hit her. The woman was not seriously injured in the July 3 incident. She said she was too drunk to report it that night. Besides, she didn’t want to miss the neighborhood’s fireworks display. The woman, 47, lives in a mobile home park near Middle Georgia State University in Macon. The next day, the alleged puncher apologized and, according to a sheriff’s report, reminded her to “stay away from his man.” Come to find out, as she later told the Cop Shop, both guys “were falling in love with me. Just by, I guess, watching me dance in the backyard with my music.” She said she also sings in the yard. “I can sing Madonna. … I can sing some AC/DC — ‘Shook Me All Night Long.’ I can rock that song.” The men vying for her affections apparently “thought I was good-looking and liked my personality. … They each were trying to get me to be their mistress,” she said. “Sounds like ‘The Young and the Restless’-slash-‘Jerry Springer,’ does it not?”

This story was originally published January 3, 2017 at 1:00 AM with the headline "Stray roosters and a trailer park love triangle top list of 2016 oddities."