‘3 beers’ lead Atlanta-area man to wrong highway home. He ends up in jail — near Macon
Law enforcement officers in Middle Georgia have encountered their share of Atlanta-area drivers who for whatever reasons — alcohol frequently among them — find themselves an hour or more from home after taking the wrong freeway and heading south. Such appears to have been the case the evening of Oct. 10 when a man cruising down Interstate 75 in a Kia Forte was pulled over in northern Monroe County.
Other drivers had reported the car as having a “possibly intoxicated” person at the wheel. The car was said to have nearly struck a motorcycle near the southbound freeway’s exit at High Falls Road. When a Monroe sheriff’s deputy stopped the Kia, its driver, 62, reportedly reeked of alcohol.
An incident report said that when the man stepped out of the car he was unsteady on his feet. He kept a hand on the car to keep his balance. When asked if he had been drinking, the man, whose speech was slurred, said he “drank three beers recently,” the report noted. The man said he was returning home from “a birthday event” in Atlanta and was headed home to Covington.
The trouble is, Covington lies 30 or so miles east of Atlanta out I-20. The man was more than 40 miles south of Atlanta on I-75. The sheriff’s deputy asked the guy if he knew where he was. The man said he was on the interstate. The deputy “clarified” his query and explained to the man that he was near Forsyth. The man was apparently unaware. Upon flunking some sobriety tests and taking a breath test that registered nearly three times the legal limit to drive, the man was jailed on a DUI charge.
Dispatches: While searching a Volkswagen Golf for drugs or other illegal items after it was pulled over for weaving down I-75 near Johnstonville Road late one night last month, a sheriff’s deputy noticed that the driver appeared to have something hidden in his clothing. The driver, 34, of Forsyth, at first said he wasn’t hiding anything, but then admitted having “methamphetamine and a pipe in his shorts.” . . . A woman from Cumming who was staying at an Airbnb near Culloden in late September called in “an animal complaint” to the Monroe sheriff’s office a week or so after she left. The woman, 46, said she had been bitten by a goat “on the property” where she had stayed. A write-up of the complaint added: “She stated that now she is fighting an infection and wanted to make a report.”