Waffle House wild woman and lost $40,000 top our list of weird news in 2017

Here at the Cop Shop, The Telegraph’s weekly digest of police report oddities, we run across plenty of bizarre happenings. As our faithful readers know, 2017 generated its share of nutty occurrences. Today we rank the year’s five zaniest incidents:

5. It wasn’t clear what set a Lawrenceville woman off in mid-February, but her outburst at a north Macon Waffle House on Riverside Drive involved slung sugar jars, tossed bottles of condiments and the upsetting of table settings. When someone asked her to leave, a sheriff’s report said, she refused, hopped on top of a table and began screaming. “Two condiment bottles and a sugar jar were damaged,” the sheriff’s report noted.

4. One night back in early March, a Lizella man in his 60s was staying in a room at the Bridgeview Inn and Suites off Eisenhower Parkway in west Macon. He asked a female friend there to do him a favor. It seems he had $40,000 cash in his room and he needed someone to guard it while he “went out gambling,” a sheriff’s report said. The man said the woman, 32, agreed. He later explained to police that “he trusted her a lot.” So he left the woman to watch over the money and went out. The next morning, another woman at the motel called the guy and informed him the woman he had left the cash with was gone. And so was the cash. The money was last seen in a gold suitcase with flowers on it.

3. In October, a mother on Jeff Davis Street in Macon called 911 to report that her teenage son was “being disrespectful.” He wouldn’t listen. All she wanted him to do was wash some dishes. When she tried to talk to him and put her hand on his shoulder, he jerked away and yelled, “Don’t put your hands on me, bro!” To which the woman replied, “I’m not your bro. I’m your mother.” The son wandered off before the cops arrived.

2. Near the town of Broxton in south Georgia, a man reportedly opened fire, shooting into the air when he had enough of a neighbor’s noisy generator. It happened back in September in the aftermath of Hurricane Irma. The man, 59, was said to have told the cops that he thought it would be a good idea to fire a few rounds in protest “as a reaction to his frustration.” He was jailed on firearm-possession charges.

1. The flowered, deep-blue carpet of the Georgia Senate was soiled as the legislative session wound down earlier this year. Dino, an explosive-sniffing canine and dutiful member of the Capitol police force, was said to be the culprit. You might say he offered up a floor resolution of his own. As one law enforcement source told the Cop Shop: “During the morning bomb sweep on the 39th day of the 40-day session, the legislators weren’t the only ones full of crap.”

Listen to Joe Kovac Jr.’s “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 22, 2017 at 11:08 AM with the headline "Waffle House wild woman and lost $40,000 top our list of weird news in 2017."