Mother accused of stealing son’s new TV, but old-fashioned police work cracks case
A Bibb County sheriff’s deputy answered a call about a theft on Rogers Avenue in Macon. A man, 33, at an apartment there said that while he was at work his mother dropped by. The man said, as an incident report from a few months back noted, that his mom “took without permission or lawful authority a 55-inch TCL 4K smart television that he had just purchased the day before.” The report said she also took the cardboard box the TV came in. The man said he thought his mother and a man she knows took the set to sell it in exchange for drugs. While the deputy was at the man’s apartment, the mother, 50, showed up and “eventually admitted that she knew where the TV was,” the report said. She said the guy that her son claimed she was with had, the report noted, “had taken the TV to give her as a gift for her birthday.” The deputy drove the woman to a residence on Ward Street, where the woman pointed the deputy to the TV, which was hooked up and, as the report added, “had a movie playing on it.” The report didn’t mention which movie, but while they were there, the man who the mother had blamed showed up. The mother was then said to have changed her story and admitted taking the TV to sell for cash on Ward Street. She was jailed on a theft charge.
Dispatches: Sometimes the seemingly most innocuous situations spin sideways. An incident some months back at a Family Dollar store on Mercer University Drive involving a shoplifting began with a fellow reportedly ambling in and browsing. It wasn’t long before a clerk noticed the guy was drunk. “He had a bottle of alcohol in his hands,” an incident report noted. “The suspect walked out the front door with what appeared to be a bag of chips.” The clerk followed the guy out and asked that he return the chips, which the report described as an “unknown brand,” or pay for them. It was then that the man, as the report put it, “raised his hand with the bottle of alcohol in it and threatened to bust (the clerk’s) head if she didn’t get away from him.” Some bystanders stepped in and shooed the man. . . . A woman on Pebble Street in Macon a while back told the cops that someone trashed her house. Four windows were smashed, the back door was kicked in, a TV was tossed on the floor and two inflatable beds were popped. Someone described the suspect as a man wearing glasses, blue pants and “a blue church shirt.”