Driver says he was out late buying son’s Christmas gift. Cops found 4 pounds of coke
A few hours before midnight on Christmas Eve, a sheriff’s deputy in Monroe County pulled over a Honda Accord that was heading south on Interstate 75 near Forsyth. The Honda, according to the deputy’s report, had been weaving in and out of the freeway’s left lane. The driver, a 34-year-old Warner Robins man, told the deputy that he had been “messing with” his phone which was linked to his car stereo.
The driver said he was heading home from a Best Buy on the south side of Atlanta where he had bought video games for his son for Christmas. It was going on 9:30 p.m. and the deputy grew suspicious. Was Best Buy open that late on Christmas Eve?
The driver said they closed at 7 but that he had to wait for his order. While a second deputy began writing the driver a traffic citation for failing to stay in his lane, the first deputy walked a drug-sniffing dog around the car. The dog “alerted” and the first deputy asked the driver if he had been smoking marijuana.
The driver said no, but that he’d been around “my cousin” who was. The deputy informed the driver that he was going to search the car, that the dog’s “alert” amounted to probable cause. A black bag on the back seat contained what were described as two “bricks” of cocaine. On the front floorboard in a gym bag, the deputy found “ a large amount” of cash and two sandwich bags of cocaine. The driver was jailed on drug-trafficking charges.
Dispatches: There was an “animal complaint” on the afternoon of Dec. 14 at a house on Boxankle Road near High Falls. A Monroe sheriff’s report said a woman there had a dog that had gone missing and that a neighbor lady had killed it. The dog owner went on to say, according to the write-up, “that she had just received the dog’s body from the neighbor.” The neighbor later told the deputy that the dog had chased her and that she ran away and threw a rock at it. She said the dog then attacked her dog and that when she pulled the attacking dog off it died. . . . It seems there was “a civil disturbance at a house on Estes Road near Bolingbroke in the small hours of Dec. 23. A woman, according to a sheriff’s report of the 2:20 a.m. episode, said her 17-year-old son had “consumed a large amount of alcohol” and argued with her. She said he hit her in the face and ran across the road. She wasn’t sure where he went. The teen was charged with public drunkenness after a sheriff’s deputy woke him upon finding the youth “passed out under a large tree.”