Trucker with dry cough causes coronavirus scare at Middle Georgia warehouse
A truck driver from Texas who dropped off a tractor-trailer haul at a shipping warehouse in Monroe County caused a stir on March 20 when he reportedly told a woman at the warehouse that, as a police report put it, he “had the coronavirus.” The trucker, 53, was gone before the authorities arrived to investigate what was noted in a Monroe sheriff’s report as an alleged “terroristic threat.” An employee at the Five Below warehouse north of Forsyth later told the cops that the trucker, from Texas, had passed through their receiving department and mentioned that he may have contracted COVID-19. Sheriff Brad Freeman told the Cop Shop in recent days that the trucker was yet to be arrested, but that the driver had been “trying to incite fear” in the people at the warehouse. The Five Below employee who first reported the episode said the driver said “that he had been suffering with symptoms similar to the coronavirus for the last three weeks” and that he “started having a dry cough, aching body and (was) feeling feverish,” the sheriff’s report noted. Other employees were concerned and the cops were called in, though by then the trucker had driven away. Deputies then began “setting up a perimeter, keeping (traffic) from coming in and out” of the shipping area “until Monroe County Hazmat … notified us otherwise.” The area was re-opened in about 15 minutes.
Dispatches: One afternoon in late February, a Bibb sheriff’s deputy was sent to check on a report of a man trespassing outside the Plaza Mart convenience store on Houston Avenue. When the deputy arrived at the store, which sits at the corner of Cynthia Avenue just south of downtown Macon, the deputy noticed a man with a case of beer. The man was drinking one of the beers. The deputy asked the man, who looked to be in his mid-30s, for his name and birth date. The man gave the deputy a name and said he was 17. “I could tell,” the deputy later noted in a report, “he was not born in 2003.” The man, it turned out, was born in 1984 and he was wanted for a probation violation. He was jailed for that and for giving a cop false information. At the county lockup, the guy reportedly told the cop said that if he saw the officer while he wasn’t on duty “he had something for me and I wasn’t nothing without a badge.” . . . A while back on Macon’s west side, a homeless man said to be exposing himself along Chambers Road was, according to a sheriff’s report, “showing his privates to passersby.” The report said the man cussed a paramedic who’d come to help him. The guy was jailed for indecent exposure for allegedly sitting along the roadside and, as the report described it, “dabbing his penis with a folded white object and eating pizza.”