Neighbor accused of swiping Macon couple’s refrigerators, trying to sell them online
A couple began moving out of a house on Gardner Street in Macon’s Payne City neighborhood on Sept. 17. The man and woman hauled away belongings and returned the next morning to gather more when the woman received a Facebook message. The message, according to a sheriff’s report, said that one of the couple’s neighbors had put some of their belongings, which were missing, up for sale on a local “yard sale” website. The couple scrolled through the ad and saw several items that they recognized — because, well, the items were theirs. There were two mini refrigerators, a couple of deep fryers and some tires. The couple tried to talk to the suspect, who is 41, but he went to his place and refused to come out. When a Bibb County sheriff’s deputy spoke to the man, the man claimed the items had been left beside the road, that the couple had been evicted. That, however, apparently wasn’t true and the man was jailed on burglary charges.
About 3 o’clock in the morning on a recent Wednesday, a man heard his dog barking. The man didn’t think much of it, but after daybreak he noticed that someone had broken into his pickup truck and rummaged through it. According to a sheriff’s report of the incident, the man said he was going through a divorce and wondered if his wife had something to do with the supposed break-in. A Bibb sheriff’s deputy spoke to the man’s wife by phone. She said her husband might have been the one who rummaged through the truck “due to the fact that he is an avid crack smoker and is very paranoid that she has placed cameras around the house and inside the vehicles in order to spy on him.”
Dispatches: A guy who lives on Napier Avenue told the cops that he had an argument “with a friend” on Sept. 17 because, as a Bibb sheriff’s report put it, “he would not give her money.” The friend later sent the man a text message that he showed to a sheriff’s deputy. The message referred to the guy’s Ford Mustang: “You won’t be driving that car to work tonight.” When the man went to leave for work, two of the car’s tires were flat. . . . On Sept. 12, a suspected shoplifter went into the Family Dollar on Pio Nono Avenue crammed some packets of ramen noodles into his pants. A manager there told the cops that she “confronted the suspect and he gave her back the noodles.” . . . A man staying at the America’s Best Value Inn on Hartley Bridge Road at Interstate 75 the night of Aug. 30 told the cops that someone broke in to his room and stole $5,000. He said he’d won the cash in an online sweepstakes and that he thinks the culprit might be a guy he knows only as “Motorcycle Man.”
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 September 21, 2018 at 10:19 AM.