COP SHOP: Georgia man charged with DUI after flinging banana peel
A green Chevy Silverado straddling the centerline on Rumble Road late one night caught the attention of two Monroe County sheriff’s deputies. The pickup, a 2003 model, was being driven by a 64-year-old Forsyth man. After the deputies pulled it over, one of the officers told the man why he’d been stopped. The deputy stepped back toward to his patrol car to run a check the man’s license. Just then the second deputy noticed the pickup’s driver toss something out the window. The first deputy turned around to see a banana peel on the ground. The deputy asked the driver to step out and pick up the peel. The deputy’s write-up of the encounter later noted that when the man stepped out to collect the peel he “almost fell.” The deputy also noticed that the fellow “had urinated on himself.” The deputy also caught wind of “a strong odor of an alcoholic beverage.” The man said he’d had “one drink,” a 24-ounce Schlitz, about six hours earlier. It was by then approaching midnight on Feb. 23. After some sobriety tests, the driver was charged with drunken driving. According to the incident report, the man was also cited for weaving, driving without taillights and for violating Georgia statute 16-7-43: littering — for allegedly tossing the banana peel.
Dispatches: There was a report of “shots being fired” one afternoon a few months back off Pio Nono Avenue in Macon’s Cherokee Heights neighborhood. A Bibb sheriff’s deputy heard a shot coming from behind a house on Cherokee Avenue, a block north of Napier Avenue. A pair of young men were there. One had a .40-caliber Taurus pistol, according to a report of the Jan. 7 episode. The guy with the gun, 24, was cited for firing near a roadway. He told the deputy he and the other guy “wasn’t bad guys” and that he had “just purchased the gun and was just trying it out.” . . . On a Friday afternoon in late January, a Bibb sheriff’s deputy was sent to check on a “suspicious person” outside Bloomfield United Methodist Church in southwest Macon. At a vacant house on the church property along Bloomfield Road, the deputy saw an unlocked door but no one was inside. It turned out the church security cameras had captured footage that showed a woman ride up in a van, get out, go in and return to the van “carrying something in her hands,” a report of the Jan. 31 incident noted. The van was reportedly seen near Nisbet Drive not far away. The deputy found the van and a woman who looked like the person in the surveillance video. “She was wearing the same clothing,” the report said. The write-up went on to say that as the woman, 50, “was taken into custody she began to say that all she got was two (cooking) pots and she would give them back.” The woman was jailed on a burglary charge. The pots were returned to the church.