Alabama trucker jailed after pulling over ‘to use bathroom’ in Georgia peach orchard
Peach pilfering in Georgia is no trifling matter. Peaches are big business, and purloiners who can’t resist the urge to filch farmers’ crops can — especially in prime picking season — can find themselves on the wrong end of the fuzz. The law, that is.
On the evening of July 8, some people called the Monroe County Sheriff’s Office to report that the driver of a tractor-trailer rig was stealing peaches in an orchard along U.S. 341 near Culloden, and that they had him blocked in. A local man and woman later informed a sheriff’s deputy that they had seen the guy in the truck pull over at the orchard. They wondered if he might have thieving eyes for some of the Dickey Farms delights grown there. Soon they saw that the man, as an incident report noted, “taken some of the peaches.”
The suspect, 54, of Valley, Alabama, was still there when the deputy arrived. The man in question was sitting, leaning against his truck near what the deputy described as “a pile of peaches.” The deputy noted that he asked the man what happened and that the man claimed he had “pulled over to pee and saw some peaches laying on the ground so he took them,” the deputy’s write-up said.
The deputy spoke to the farmer, who said he wanted to press charges and so the deputy did. The alleged peach poacher was jailed on a theft-by-taking charge. The farmer estimated the man had grabbed 10 or 15 pounds of the fruit, later telling the Cop Shop that “they were pretty peaches.”
Dispatches: A Juliette-area man in his late 50s was pulled over along Rumble Road near Interstate 75 and later suspected of drunken driving. There was, according to a Monroe sheriff’s deputy’s report of the June 27 episode, a “very strong odor of alcohol” coming from the man’s SUV. There was said to be a water bottle in the driver’s door “half full of vodka,” and the man admitted he had been drinking. After the deputy also found a “small baggie” of cocaine in the vehicle, the man said he had used the coke “to stay awake to drive home from Atlanta after drinking so much.” He was jailed on DUI and drug charges. . . . Monroe deputies answered a call on High Road about a heavy-equipment operator who was demanding payment from his employers after quitting mid-job. The equipment operator, in his late 20s, reportedly became “very disrespectful” toward man and his mother, prompting the son to tell the worker that he “would lay (the worker) out” if he kept talking to his family that way.