Video shows stampede of 70 youths bum-rushing Macon Wal-Mart
They looked like shoppers at a door-buster special -- only faster and more destructive.
As dozens of young people bum-rushed the Wal-Mart on Macon’s northwest side early Sunday, a handful of shoppers and employees appeared to stand slack-jawed as the wave streamed through.
The mob, in an organized effort bent on vandalism and disruptive mischief, came and went in about a minute.
In its wake, cases of beer and many other items were strewn from one end of the Zebulon Road discount emporium to the other.
Authorities first estimated the crowd at between 40 and 50 people. But after surveillance videos of the ruckus were made public on Wednesday, a count by The Telegraph found that the number was significantly greater.
Those in the crowd who at least set foot in the store were part of a group that was about 70 strong. A handful of them, however, never made it much farther than the front door.
Those who’d led the charge ran the length of the store and were already exiting by the time the stragglers entered, turning them around in a mad dash to the parking lot. By witness accounts, they rode off in 20 to 30 cars.
When they first entered the store shortly before 2 a.m. Sunday, mostly male teens sprinted in.
They bolted along the edge of the store’s supermarket aisles, speeding past the produce and a cooler display adorned with red, white and blue bunting.
A man, perhaps a shopper, appeared to stand awestruck near a Budweiser display as the throng tore in on his heels.
Some young ladies soon strolled in, a few sauntering with no apparent sense of urgency.
It doesn’t appear that everyone in the crowd toppled merchandise. Some dashed through, apparently for the fun of it.
Even so, a Wal-Mart worker told sheriff’s deputies that the group left an estimated $2,000 worth of damage in its wake.
One camera angle shows the group rounding a corner near the store’s grocery aisles, with startled employees ducking back into side aisles as many in the crowd pulled items from the shelves and displays.
Sometime after the horde dispersed, a 17-year-old Macon youth was charged with criminal damage and inciting a riot. As of Wednesday, he was the only person who’d been arrested in the matter.
He was caught when he returned to the store in the aftermath of the outburst to back to pick up his cellphone, a sheriff’s report noted.
The teen, Kharron Green, who lives a few miles south of the Wal-Mart off Thomaston Road, reportedly told an employee there that he and others in the crowd “planned to see how much damage they could cause.”
The 208,000-square-foot store, which opened in spring 2004 just east of Interstate 475, anchors one of the area’s busiest shopping districts.
The episode there early Sunday has inspired racist vitriol in online comments and prompted phone calls and emails to The Telegraph, blasting the newspaper for not mentioning the race of the young people who stormed the Wal-Mart.
News outlets from New York to Florida, including CNN, FOX News and others, have called the sheriff’s office about the case.
An article about the incident in Tuesday’s Telegraph’s was among the lead items on the Drudge Report, generating nearly half a million page views locally.
“It’s gotten a bit of national attention,” said sheriff’s spokesman Lt. Randy Gonzalez.
He said the task for investigators now is to see if they can catch more of the culprits who stampeded through the store.
“They’ll follow up on any leads that come in,” Gonzalez said. “We put the video out there in hopes that maybe somebody in the general public may recognize any of the individuals out there that night.”
This story was originally published July 1, 2015 at 11:07 AM with the headline "Video shows stampede of 70 youths bum-rushing Macon Wal-Mart ."