Cop Shop Blog

Man in Walmart threatens to kill woman because of her ‘loud’ kids, Georgia cops say

A Bibb County sheriff’s deputy who answered a call about a “fight in progress” at the Walmart on Zebulon Road arrived and learned that two customers had clashed near the store’s self-checkout lane.

A Walmart employee told the deputy that a 74-year-old Macon man had, as a report put it, “yelled obscenities” at a 32-year-old Rentz woman who had been shopping with two young children.

The Walmart employee said the man thought the children were “being loud” and “shouted at them to ‘shut the (expletive) up.’”

A “verbal altercation” ensued between the man and the children’s mother, the deputy’s report of the Jan. 23 incident said, and the man “approached the mother with clenched fists and stated ... ‘I will kill you.’”

The deputy soon spoke to the man involved and asked for his version of events.

“They were loud,” the man said.

The man — charged with simple assault and disorderly conduct — was escorted to a patrol car. On the way, the deputy explained to him that he was banned from all Walmart stores, a revelation the man apparently didn’t appreciate.

“He spun around,” the deputy’s report said, “putting his chest to mine and instructed me to ‘shut the (expletive) up.’”

Dispatches: A woman in Monroe County said a security camera at her house recorded footage of a boy kicking her garage door. “She does not know who the kid is but he came up to her house multiple times and kicked her garage door causing the door handle to fall off and denting the door,” a sheriff’s deputies report of the Feb. 8 incident said. The boy, it turned out, lived nearby. His mother told the deputy that she would speak to the woman whose door was dented and “resolve the situation.” . . . A Macon woman who’d stopped along Interstate 75 in Monroe County one night in early February flunked a series of sobriety tests. She told a sheriff’s deputy that she ran out of gas. She reeked of alcohol and said she had a “cranberry and vodka” a few hours earlier, the deputy’s write-up noted. The deputy later searched her Kia K900 and found open bottles of Smirnoff vodka and Ciroc mango vodka. When asked to do a one-leg-stand sobriety test, the woman, 43, declined. She offered up the not-uncommon and perhaps overly honest refrain, “I could not do this if I was sober.”

This story was originally published March 4, 2022 at 7:00 AM.

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.
Get unlimited digital access
#ReadLocal

Try 1 month for $1

CLAIM OFFER