Cop Shop Blog

Georgia cop tells driver to hand over license, but driver insists the cop say ‘please’

A man at the wheel of a 1993 Ford pickup was cutting through a parking lot on North Lee Street in Forsyth when a Monroe County sheriff’s deputy pulled the truck over for making an improper turn. The man, who was sluggish and had glassy eyes at first appeared intoxicated, the deputy’s report of the Feb. 15 incident noted.

The deputy asked for the driver’s license, but the man said something the deputy couldn’t understand. Then the man, 37, repeated himself, asking the deputy, “Can you put a please with it?”

Later, after the man began recording video of the encounter on his cellphone, the deputy asked how much he’d had to drink. “He briefly laughed before saying that he does not drink,” the deputy’s report said.

The man then refused to step out of the truck, the report added, and “pulled away” when the deputy tried to “escort him” from the pickup. He then “violently pulled away” and, the report went on, said, “You wanna fight, buddy?”

The deputy later used his Taser after the man allegedly resisted the deputy and another officer who showed up to arrest the driver, who was said to have “actively resisted.”

The first deputy asked another man in the truck why the driver was so “combative.” The passenger said the driver had not been drinking, but that they had just returned from Atlanta and “he was probably upset over the traffic.”

The driver was cited for misdemeanor obstruction of an officer and making an illegal turn.

Dispatches: A Forsyth man, 23, reported to the cops there on Sept. 20 that his ex-fiancee, a 30-year-old Henry County woman, had stolen the passwords to his Venmo, Facebook and Xbox accounts. He said she also took an air compressor, two miter saws and other tools. . . . Two days later on Sept. 22, a sheriff’s deputy in northern Monroe answered a call about illegal dumping at High Falls Lake. A man who lives there said a neighbor of his on Lakeshore Drive had trimmed her bushes earlier in the day and tossed the debris into the lake. The man, according to a report, said the debris floated near his dock and “damaged” his boat’s trolling motor. The neighbor denied the accusation, saying she had done no yard work and had not thrown anything into the lake.

Joe Kovac Jr.
The Telegraph
Joe Kovac Jr. writes about local news and features for The Telegraph, with an eye for human-interest stories. Joe is a Warner Robins native and graduate of Warner Robins High. He joined the Telegraph in 1991 after graduating from the University of Georgia. As a Pulliam Fellowship recipient in 1991, Joe worked for the Indianapolis News. His stories have appeared in the Washington Post, the Seattle Times and Atlanta Magazine. He has been a Livingston Award finalist and won numerous Georgia Press Association and Georgia Associated Press awards.
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