Spat over sticks for Middle Georgia man’s fire pit ignites rage, witness tells cops
The man pulled up along a Middle Georgia highway late last month and said he had been going there for years to pick up sticks. It wasn’t immediately clear what the allure of the sticks was.
But that was when the trouble began at a parking area at a tractor-trailer shop along Ga. 74 in rural southern Monroe County the afternoon of Jan. 28. Two men, including the property owner who’d been standing near where some trees had recently been cut down, told the cops that a man in his early 70s had wheeled up in a Toyota Highlander.
The property owner asked the fellow what he was doing. The man said he had come to “collect sticks,” according to a Monroe sheriff’s report. The property owner asked the collector who he was. The collector “became aggressive and would not tell … his name, only that he came there to collect the sticks,” the report said, adding that the stranger “began yelling.”
The stranger, in his Toyota, twice “quickly accelerated and slammed on brakes as if he was going to hit” the property owner. A sheriff’s deputy tracked the man down and he denied “an altercation of any kind,” the write-up said. He said the property owner had been “aggressive” and “yelling at him.” He also denied trying to hit the property owner with his SUV.
He said the property owner “was in the path of his car when he turned around.” The Toyota driver said he had for eight years been going “to the location to collect sticks from the wooded area for his fire pit … and no one ever gave him any trouble.”
Dispatches: A woman on Blount Road east of High Falls reported to the cops on Feb. 1 that she believed her ex-husband and his girlfriend had broken into her house. The woman said she “found muddy boot prints on top of her dryer” a couple of weeks earlier and suspects they may have belonged to her ex. . . . A Colorado man at the wheel of a 2000 Acura Integra was pulled over on Interstate 75 north of Forsyth in late December. The man, 26, had slurred speech and reeked of alcohol, according to a sheriff’s report. He said he was on his way to visit his wife north of Atlanta. He also said he hadn’t been drinking. But after failing sobriety tests he was handcuffed and charged with DUI. He refused to take a breath test and said he was on medication “because of a mental state.” A deputy told him he probably shouldn’t mix meds and alcohol, to which the man replied, “If I had killed someone, I wouldn’t tell y’all so I’m not going to tell you if I (have) been drinking.”