Oops! Man begging for money at Macon food mart picks wrong guy to hit up for cash

In the predawn hours of Sept. 27, a man at an Exxon food mart on Pio Nono Avenue in Macon was, as a Bibb County sheriff’s report put it, “asking customers for money for various reasons.” The report doesn’t mention what those reasons may have been, but it does say that the sheriff’s deputy who wrote the report had in the past warned the man about hassling patrons there. On this particular morning, the man begging, 41, already had been turned down by two customers. The man, according to the sheriff’s report, “followed the rejections with profound language.” One patron was said to have “become fearful” and that she drove away “fairly quickly.” When the sheriff’s deputy pulled up at the store, which sits at the corner of Dent Street and Pio Nono, just north of Eisenhower Parkway, the man asked the deputy for money. Instead of money, the man got a trip to jail. The deputy asked the man for his ID, and as the man began checking his pockets, the deputy noted, “he gave me what I know as the ‘thousand-yard stare.’ ” The man was arrested on charges that included disorderly conduct and solicitation.

There was a report of a shoplifter at the Dollar General at the corner of Houston and Villa Esta avenues in south Macon the afternoon of Sept. 4. A tall, skinny fellow with hazel eyes who was wearing a dark shirt with purple pants that had a white stripe running down the side of them had been in and out of the store “throughout the day,” a sheriff’s report noted. The last time the guy left, a store clerk noticed that there was something tucked in his pants. That something? Eight boxes of Hot Pockets. The clerk followed the alleged Hot Pocket pilferer outside to a waiting Ford Expedition. The clerk, according to the sheriff’s report, saw that the suspect “was taking the Hot Pockets out of his waistline while the driver of the Ford backed up and left.”

Dispatches: A man was at a friend’s house on Neal Avenue in Macon’s Pleasant Hill neighborhood the evening of Oct. 11 when the car he was driving, which belonged to his girlfriend, was stolen. The car was a 2001 Nissan Maxima with a University of Alabama sticker on the back window. The man who’d borrowed it said he had left the keys in the car in a cup holder when he parked it “because he wouldn’t be long” at the friend’s house. . . . A man seen on Shi Place in southeast Macon was not shy when a resident there asked him what he was doing on the side of his house in the wee hours of Sept. 4. The home owner had returned from visiting a sick relative in the hospital and discovered that his TV set was missing. According to a sheriff’s report, the guy outside, before walking off, said he was just “taking a leak.”

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.