Meth stashed in toy car outside Georgia sheriff’s office prompts short trip to jail
One afternoon a week before Christmas, someone spotted a man with a toy outside the Monroe County Justice Center. It was not Santa Claus, but rather a fellow from the northern part of the county who had ridden there with his mother.
She had come to deposit money in an incarcerated relative’s jailhouse commissary account. While the man waited outside, as a sheriff’s report later noted, he was seen near one of the building’s rain gutters. He was said to have “placed a red toy car near the gutter.”
A deputy, informed of the unusual activity, stepped outside and “immediately recognized” the man from the man’s previous stay inside the county lockup, the report said. “It was clear he was under the influence of something.” By then the man, 41, had returned to the automobile that he arrived in.
The deputy before long walked over to where the guy had been seen earlier with the toy car, the variety or size of which was not further described in the write-up. The deputy found the toy and a “small baggie” of methamphetamine tucked in it. Then the deputy showed it to the man who “immediately stated with spontaneous utterance, ‘It’s not mines. … I put it out of the car because I didn’t want to get blamed for it.’”
Meanwhile, the deputy spotted another baggie of meth in the handle of the car’s driver-side door. The deputy collected it, handcuffed the man and, the report added, found “more toys similar to the one” by the building. Soon the man’s mother, 70, emerged from the jailhouse and she too was detained. Asked who the meth belonged to, they blamed each other. Both were charged with drug possession.
Dispatches: A full-size red car, a Chevy Camaro, whizzed past a Monroe sheriff’s deputy on Interstate 75 late one night in early January. The car was doing 115 mph. The deputy took off after it. The driver, a 39-year-old man from south Houston County, cruised to a halt at a weigh station on the north side of Forsyth. One of the first things he did, perhaps in an effort to curry favor, was blurt out the pro-police slogan, “Back the blue.” It didn’t much help. The deputy noticed that the fellow smelled of alcohol. The driver said someone on the freeway had been trying to get him to race and that, as a report of the Jan. 9 incident noted, “the only reason he pulled into (the) weigh station was to ‘take a leak.’” The man said he hadn’t been drinking and that the alcohol smell must be from when he drank the night before. On the way to jail after flunking sobriety tests, he wondered why “my radar detector didn’t go off.” The deputy enlightened him: “I was using a laser.” . . . A woman at a house on High Falls Road in northern Monroe County reported that a man who was angry at her for not returning his car bashed in her front door with a sledgehammer and, as a sheriff’s report noted, “set a fire in her Jacuzzi.”