Macon woman reports ‘online relationship’ with phony soldier who begged for gift cards
It was Valentine’s Day afternoon when a Macon woman called the cops to report that she was being harassed by a man she met on the Internet. A Bibb County sheriff’s write-up would later note that the woman, 43, said that sometime in mid-November she had “entered an online relationship” with a fellow by the name of “Charlie Rico.” The pair apparently never met in person, the sheriff’s report said, noting that the man “posed as a military vet (on) active duty in Syria” and that he sent the woman pictures of himself dressed in Army fatigues. “During their ‘relationship,’ he would continuously ask her for gift cards to the point she got tired of it and blocked him,” the sheriff’s report said.
Dispatches: A Bibb sheriff’s deputy was sent to check on a young man at a Macon hospital Feb. 16 after the guy reported being injured in what was described as “a large brawl” at the Rodeo Bar and Grill on Pio Nono Avenue in south Macon. The man, 23, said he “believes he was struck in the arm by a beer bottle … and was bleeding badly,” the deputy’s report said. It took 20 medical staples to patch his wound, the report noted. “It was also discovered that (the man) does have a warrant with superior court probation, but due to amount of blood loss and (his) intoxication level he was told to call his probation officer as soon as he can.” . . . A pair of teenage boys were said to have walked out of the CVS on Gray Highway Feb. 15 without paying for, as a sheriff’s report put it, “three unknown cases of beer.” . . . A 43-year-old north Macon woman was arrested on a shoplifting charge Feb. 17 at Pet Supplies Plus next to Kroger on Forsyth Road. The woman was seen in the “fish section” and later at the checkout with some lights for a fish tank. The woman first claimed she had entered the store carrying the lights and that they were hers already, a sheriff’s report said. A clerk then discovered that the woman allegedly exchanged her used lights with some new ones, leaving the ones she’d come into the store with in the box that contained the new ones she was now holding. The woman admitted what she’d done, the report said, adding that “what she did was stupid, and she had no excuse.”