Wackiest cop reports of 2020: Stolen teeth, ruined BBQ and — yikes — a shower snake
Over the past 12 months, the Cop Shop, the Telegraph’s weekly compendium of police report oddities, included its share of unusual occurrences. (Of course it did. It was 2020.) Today we count down the year’s five strangest incidents:
5. A Grubhub delivery driver was dropping off food at a house in Monroe County the evening of April 27. The driver, 21, told a sheriff’s deputy that as she walked into the garage, someone at the house opened a door. She said the family’s dog, a schnauzer named Maggie, “ran up to her and bit her right leg,” an incident report noted. The driver said she delivered the food and called 911 to file a report. She declined medical help for what was described as “a small laceration … below her knee.” The dog’s owners told the deputy that they had requested “contactless delivery” and just wanted the food left on their porch. They said, as the report put it, “Maggie is usually not aggressive.”
4. A Forsyth man reported in May that his ex-girlfriend kicked a hole in his front door. He said she unlatched the lock and walked in. The man, 59, of a Sharp Street address, said that when the woman came in he ran out the back door. A Forsyth police report said the woman, 41, then locked the man out. Until, that is, he threatened to call the law. When he was let back inside, the man told the woman “she needed to leave so he could eat his dinner,” the police report went on, “at which point she took his dinner and threw it on the floor before leaving.” The man told a police officer that he figures the damage to his door amounted to $300. He said his dinner, a barbecue chicken plate, set him back $8.
3. In late July, cops were sent to house near High Falls Lake in northern Monroe to check on “a vehicle fire.” A sheriff’s deputy would later mention in a report that “the vehicle was located in the back yard.” It was there that the deputy spoke to a man who said his father, 67, had ignited the automobile. The deputy asked the father why he had set fire to the black 2002 Acura TL. “He said that he didn’t like the car,” the report said. It was unclear why he was not fond of it.
2. The Bibb County sheriff’s report was all of three sentences. It began by mentioning that a 33-year-old man had called the sheriff’s office in late February to report a theft. The guy who called said that a 25-year-old woman he knows “has taken his dentures and gone to a friend’s house.” The man said he didn’t wish to pursue criminal charges. He said he “just wanted his dentures back.”
1. A woman who lives near Interstate 75 and Bolingbroke reported going into her bathroom in mid-April and finding a black rat snake in the shower. The snake had apparently been removed or slithered off by the time a Monroe sheriff’s deputy arrived. The woman, whose concerns were noted in an incident report, insisted the snake had been planted by someone. She said “there was no way the snake just got into the shower” because the enclosure is “really tall and it couldn’t climb that far up,” the report said. The deputy took a closer look and concluded that “the shower wall had what looked like the shape of a snake crawling behind it. The shape looked like a snake could have possibly been trapped behind the shower wall” but was no longer there.