Former Macon mayor Jack Ellis arrested while complaining about apartment trash pile
Former Macon Mayor Jack Ellis says he was arrested and handcuffed by Bibb County sheriff’s deputies on Tuesday after being told to leave an east Macon apartment complex where he had shown up to complain about an over-filled trash bin.
The complaint against him, he said, involved alleged criminal trespassing at the Creekside Apartments.
It was there that he had called a midday news conference to address the garbage pile, which sits in a parking lot in front of residences near the intersection of Merriwood and Creekwood drives.
Ellis and a reporter from The Telegraph were asked to leave by an apartment employee.
Not long after the reporter left, shortly after noon, Ellis said sheriff’s deputies who’d been called by the apartment’s management arrested him after he refused to leave what he insisted was a city street and public property.
Ellis said that when he arrived at the county jail he was released before being booked.
“They didn’t book me because the sheriff got a hold to it and told them to release me,” Ellis said.
Sheriff David Davis said later that the case would be looked into further by sheriff’s officials but that for now Ellis has not been charged with a crime.
Ellis said it was “nonsense” that he would be handcuffed and driven to jail and have his car towed because he had merely been trying to “do a public good.”
The over-filled bin at the Creekside complex has since September had residents wondering when it will be hauled away.
The garbage pile has become a disposal dilemma. The mound of refuse, which includes bags of household waste, tires and furniture, was apparently intended to be used as a receptacle to dump furniture that was in the apartments of people who’d been evicted.
But the rectangular bin, which is roughly the shape of a cut-in-half shipping container, has for more than two months been over-stuffed with trash, doubling the height of its roughly 4-foot walls.
An employee there at Creekside Apartments off Kitchens Road in a neighborhood behind the Georgia Army National Guard Readiness Center north of Shurling Drive said Tuesday that before the trash can be carted away on a truck that someone will have to toss out the excess trash. Or move it to another bin.
The matter caught the attention the former mayor, who on Tuesday called reporters to get something done about the mess.
“The residents, are they supposed to come and take this out? Where are they gonna put it, on the ground? ... And you smell it. It’s garbage — flies, rats, I saw rats running through there,” Ellis said.
A second employee at the apartments declined to give his name or discuss the matter.
Ellis has a friend who lives at the apartments and said he noticed the trash heap in late September.
Resident Jeanette Oates said the bin was there in part for the dumping of furniture and other belongings of people who’d been evicted.
“I guess everybody else has been using it as a trash dump,” she said, “and it’s disgusting. It’s been here way too long. It brings vermin, it stinks. I just really feel like it’s time for it to move.”