Uber driver punched when drunken Macon passenger thinks driver is stealing car
When a Bibb County sheriff’s deputy wheeled into a driveway north of Hartley Bridge Road about 11:30 p.m. on Nov. 21, the deputy saw a young man standing by a Honda Pilot. The SUV’s flashers were on. The young man, 23, “appeared to be intoxicated,” the deputy’s write-up of the encounter noted. The deputy asked the guy what was wrong. The young man replied that someone had just driven up and tried to kidnap his sister. The deputy saw another man nearby and asked him what was up. That man, 44, said he was an Uber driver and that he had driven the younger fellow home from a Macon bar. The driver said that on the way to the young man’s house on Bankston Lake Road, the young man had “started getting very aggressive toward him,” the report said. The driver said the guy also accused him of stealing his sister’s car. The driver said that when they got to the house, the young man got out and rushed to the driver’s door and punched the driver in his face. The driver shoved him away and locked the doors. He said the young man then punched and kicked the driver’s SUV. The deputy spoke to the young man’s sister. No, she hadn’t been kidnapped. And, no, the Uber driver hadn’t taken her car. She told the deputy that her brother had been kicked out of the bar for trying to start fights. The young man was jailed on an assault charge.
A woman on Beddingfield Avenue off Houston Avenue in south Macon said her adult son showed up at her door the morning of Nov. 26 with a strange request. His girlfriend, according to a Bibb sheriff’s report, had driven him there so he could wash his face. The woman told her son to leave, that he was not welcome there. The son, 24, “got mad” and grabbed a garden hoe, the report noted, and then began “stabbing” his mother’s bedroom door, “busting it down.” The son then dropped the hoe and took off with his girlfriend.
Dispatches: Late one night back in mid-October, the cops were called to Billy’s Clubhouse, a bar on Forest Hill Road in north Macon. It was about 1:30 a.m. and a bouncer there told a Bibb sheriff’s deputy that a “rude customer” was “wanting to fight,” a report of the incident noted. The deputy asked the patron, 29, to leave, “which he did by walking to the sidewalk and talking crap while standing there,” the report went on. “After a few minutes, the customer walked over to the wall and started cussing and said, ‘(Expletive) the bar and the bouncer.’ ” When the guy kept cussing, the deputy asked him to leave. The guy said he knew his rights. Along about then, after the man kept mouthing off, the deputy read him his rights and took him to jail for disorderly conduct. . . . On Nov. 25, a man on Lagrange Place off Old Forsyth Road in northwest Macon told the cops that someone had spray-painted a smiley face on his trash can. . . . Overheard on Bibb sheriff’s radio the evening of Nov. 22: “Female beating a male with a rake.”
Listen to the “Cop Shop Podcast” every week at macon.com. Note to midstate law enforcement agencies: Email reports of unusual situations your officers encounter to Telegraph reporter and Cop Shop columnist Joe Kovac Jr. at jkovac@macon.com.
This story was originally published December 14, 2017 at 5:21 PM with the headline "Uber driver punched when drunken Macon passenger thinks driver is stealing car."