‘Enraged,’ spitting beer thief slugs store clerk who was armed with Taser, cops say
It is not unusual for shoplifters to walk out of convenience stores without paying for beer. But what happened on a recent Tuesday night on Macon’s west side went beyond a typical beer run. A pair of Bibb County sheriff’s deputies were dispatched to the Marathon gas mart on Harrison Road off Eisenhower Parkway shortly before midnight Jan. 21. A man who works there as a clerk said a guy had just walked in, grabbed a can of Steel Reserve malt liquor and tried to pay at the cash register. The card he used, however, was declined. Undeterred, as a sheriff’s report noted, the guy picked up the beer and left. The clerk, according to the report, “went outside and tapped the suspect on the shoulder to let him know he did not pay for the beer. That is when the suspect became enraged and began to hit the clerk in the face.” The alleged beer thief was said to have returned later, but the clerk pulled a Taser he keeps for protection, the report said, and scared the guy away. The deputies soon spotted the guy nearby and took him to the gas mart for the clerk to identify. When the cops rolled down a patrol car window for the clerk to take a look at the guy, “the suspect spit at” the clerk “and made serious threats … to harm the victim,” the report said. “The suspect was very argumentative and aggressive the entire way to jail,” the report went on, adding that the guy was charged with theft, battery, and making terroristic threats. He was also said to have kicked one of the deputies “near the face.”
Dispatches: The pastor at Macon’s Church of Living God called the cops Jan. 22 to report, as a sheriff’s write-up explained, “a problem that they have had in the past with people breaking into their church vans and living in them.” The most recent break-in revealed no van dwellers, but the sheriff’s report mentioned “there was a plate of old food and other items inside the van that would suggest someone had been living” there. . . . Bibb deputies were sent to a residence on Elizabeth Street just after 2 a.m. Jan. 21 to deal with “a domestic dispute between brothers,” a report said. One of the brothers, who was 24, was said to be “continuously using fighting words,” telling the other brother to “bring it.” According to the sheriff’s write-up, the 24-year-old brother went on to say, “I don’t care if the police are here.” The report said he was also cussing and that when he “continued to breach the peace by yelling,” he was arrested on a charge of disorderly conduct.