Georgia man’s pet dog finds satchel of meth. Now someone may be going to prison
A man named Cody in the south Georgia hamlet of Ochlocknee made an unusual discovery one day in late 2019. The find was actually made by his family’s dog: a brown satchel, which as federal officials later noted, sparked “a chain of events” that would in April of this year result in a man pleading guilty to distributing methamphetamine.
The bag contained about a third of a pound of meth. The drugs may have been untraceable were it not for some lottery tickets that were also in the bag. Agents soon learned that the tickets had been purchased in the nearby town of Meigs at a convenience store called Susie Q’s.
Security cameras there captured footage of a man in his early 40s buying the tickets. It turned out that he was at a nearby motel, the Grady Lodge. It was there, according to court documents, on the very day of the dog’s discovery that the man allegedly attacked a woman he knew, “demanding to know ‘where his (expletive) was.’”
The motel is more than four miles from where the dog lived and it wasn’t clear whether the dog had lugged the bag that far. What is clear is what acting U.S. Attorney Peter D. Leary said in a statement: “It’s not every day that a family pet helps nab a drug trafficker.”
Dispatches: On the morning of May 12, a young woman took the witness stand in a murder case in Bibb County Superior Court. The woman, 19, is the mother of a child whose father was on trial in a fatal 2018 shooting in southeast Macon. Upon being asked to “tell the truth, the whole and nothing but the truth,” she offered no response. A prosecutor asked her what was up? “I barely can’t hear you,” the woman replied. “My ears stopped up.” Then she was asked her age and where she works. Obstinate, she shot back, “This is part of the case?” The judge sent the jury out and told the woman, “I get the sense that you don’t want to be here.” The woman replied, “I don’t feel good.” The judge said, “Well, let me tell you how this works, OK? … The lawyers ask the questions.” She said she didn’t know. “Well,” the judge said, “welcome to court.” . . . Another priceless exchange came later in the day in the form of an audio recording that prosecutors played while another witness was on the stand. That witness, another young woman, had a few days earlier received a telephone call from the county jail. The call was from an inmate, one who prosecutors said was acting as an intermediary for the man on trial. Prosecutors said the caller was offering $3,000 to the young woman if she could persuade her mother, a witness in the case, to testify that she had not seen the defendant at the murder scene. The inmate calling also promised to retain an attorney for the young woman’s brother who was in jail in an unrelated case. The caller advised the young woman to “go on the internet” and to “Google ‘the best lawyer in central Georgia’ and we’re gonna get him.”