Young Middle Georgia couple caught in curious episode at abandoned country store
At about 9 o’clock on an early-August night, a sheriff’s deputy was dispatched to a dilapidated and all-but-overgrown country store that sits along Ga. 74 in southern Monroe County.
The low-slung, vine-shrouded roadside mart — which in its most recent incarnation was known as the Highway 74 Stop & Shop — hearkens to a bygone era when old-fashioned gas pumps sat beneath squat, porch-like overhangs in dirt driveways of establishments that sometimes offered the only convenience-store-like wares for miles around.
The store is just west of Lower Thomaston Road, about three miles or so from the upper reaches of Lake Tobesofkee, just across the highway from the site of Montpelier Institute, founded in 1842 as the state’s second-oldest school for girls.
So for a young couple looking for mischief, the place may easily have screamed of fun to be had. The deputy had been apprised of the situation by a local who said a car had wheeled into the woodline beside the store and switched off its lights. The deputy arrived and, according to an incident report, encountered a young man and woman, both believed to be 18, sitting in a blue 2008 Toyota Camry.
Curiously, on the car’s roof, sat a brick, which the deputy asked the couple about. They said they “had just found it” on the property, the deputy’s write-up said. The two, from Thomaston about 30 miles away, went on to say that they had, for some reason, learned of the store’s existence on Snapchat and “wanted to come check it out.”
The report said the young man, however, soon admitted that he had thrown the brick through the store’s front door, shattering its glass. He was jailed on a disorderly conduct charge. The young woman was later “released to her family.”
Dispatches: A “disturbance” call at the Quick Zip gas mart on Ga. 87 near Juliette on Aug. 26 involved a man who said another guy had shoved him. The man who was shoved said he just wanted to be left alone. The man who supposedly shoved the fellow apparently claimed he had just been walking down the sidewalk in front of the store and that the other guy was in his way. He kept asking a sheriff’s deputy who was trying to sort things out, “What’s a sidewalk for?” . . . An Atlanta-man who was pulled over for a traffic violation on Interstate 75 in northern Monroe County on Aug. 28 had four multi-colored pills of suspected ecstasy in his car. The man, according to a report, told a sheriff’s deputy he just “found (the pills) on the ground” was going to “return them to the rightful owner.”