Man spews foul mess in stranger’s car. Cops make him don hazmat suit for trip to jail
Early one summer morning, Forsyth police were dispatched to a Marathon gas mart on North Lee Street where there was, as an incident report would later note, “an intoxicated person refusing to exit someone’s car.”
The person in question turned out to be a 19-year-old man from nearby Barnesville. He was sitting in a woman’s Toyota Camry, and the woman, who said she had no idea who the young man was, told the cops that “he had thrown up in her car.”
The woman, who apparently worked there, had told the guy to get out but he wouldn’t, the report said. So in stepped a police officer to get some answers. The officer, according to her report, saw that the guy was sitting in the driver’s seat “with a large pile of vomit in his lap and all over his hands. The vomit was also on the steering wheel” and floorboard.
The man said he had been out drinking all night and that the car was his brother’s. It was not.
“He wasn’t really able to answer a lot of questions,” the officer’s write-up of the late-June episode said, “due to his ... intoxication level.” The man was arrested on a public-drunkenness charge. “Due to the amount of throw up on (him),” the officer’s report continued, “I gave him a white paper hazmat suit to put on over his clothing.”
Dispatches: On occasion, the Cop Shop dips into Telegraph archives for curious tidbits from Macon’s past. A two-paragraph article from April 1919 bore the headline “Dog Leads To Argument” and the subhead “And Then the Police Are Called in to Make an Arrest.” It seems the dog, which according to the story went by the name “Will-he-bite-you,” caused a stir at a store on Church Street. A motorcycle cop by name of Thigpen learned that two men wanted to buy the pooch from a fellow at the store. The fellow was asking $7 for the pup. “But the two men said they would give only $5,” the article noted, adding that “Detectives Evans and Stevens were requested to stop the argument.” The prospective buyers were later arrested for taking the dog for a walk “without the owner’s consent.” . . . For a stretch in 1886, the Macon paper published a “Police Points” column. It was a compilation of one-liners gathered from city cops. Among the factoids noted in one installment that March was word that “there are more married men on the Macon police force than on any other in the State.” And that “the clubs used by the Macon police are made of locust wood.” There was also mention that “the thieves who stole the umbrellas from Messrs. Horne & Phillips, the haberdashers, are still at large. They will probably keep dry when it rains again.”