Pair accused of stealing clothes from charity ‘didn’t know we were doing anything wrong’

There was a strange sight at the Publix shopping center on Tom Hill Sr. Boulevard in north Macon on a recent Saturday morning. According to a Bibb County sheriff’s report, a man and a woman were “hiding in the bushes” in front of the public library branch. A sheriff’s deputy rode up and “observed the subjects coming out of the bushes.” The two said they were “waiting on a friend to wake up” at a nearby motel. The deputy noticed the pair had stashed a shopping cart in the bushes and covered it with a blanket. The deputy asked what was in the buggy. “A TV,” said the man, 24. Also in the cart with the 40-inch flat-screen were “several large bags of clothing.” The man said the stuff had been behind the supermarket, but the deputy learned there was a Goodwill donation drop across the parking lot. A Goodwill employee said the items had just been taken from the porch there. The woman, 21, who’d been in the bushes with the man, admitted taking the stuff from Goodwill, the report said. She told the deputy who arrested the pair on theft charges, “We didn’t know we were doing anything wrong.”

A Bibb sheriff’s deputy pulled over a Volkswagen Passat for speeding Aug. 2. The man at the wheel was doing 57 mph in a 40-mph zone as he headed out Mercer University Drive in Macon’s Unionville area. The deputy’s write-up said, “I noticed the aroma of marijuana.” The driver, 24, claimed the smell was cigarette smoke. The deputy found small pieces of what looked like pot in a book bag behind the driver’s seat. The driver insisted the grassy flecks were lawn clippings. He said he was a landscaper. The deputy kept searching and found a stolen 10mm pistol under a seat. The driver, a convicted marijuana dealer, was jailed on a gun charge.

Dispatches: On Aug. 7, a woman on Marse Allen Road in south Macon told the cops that someone broke into a building behind her house that serves as her husband’s “man cave” and stole a 55-inch television. . . . The driver of a Hyundai Sonata that Bibb sheriff’s deputies said led them on a high-speed chase on Aug. 11 before it crashed into a house on Washington Avenue smelled of marijuana as he was being driven to the county jail. The man said the weed was hidden in his pants. “After putting on latex gloves,” the officer’s write-up said, “I removed the marijuana from his underwear.” . . . An Aug. 10 sheriff’s report of a fight on Columbus Road in west Macon bore the ring of poetry. A man who was “very intoxicated” described the tussle to a sheriff’s deputy, who typed it up in a paragraph that read, in part: “He was visiting his friend Slim/Hoochie when he was attacked by a subject … Honeyman. (He) tried to fight back but Honeyman got the best of him.”

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.