Cop Shop Blog

Georgia burglar breaks into burger shop, leaves big clue that leads cops straight to him

A Macon man who broke into an eatery on North Avenue in the middle of the night and stole $750 didn’t make it very difficult for the police to find him. He left his ID next to a drink dispenser.

The man, 33, said he had a good reason for doing so — a reason, that while not so good, he explained during a May 26 hearing in Bibb County Superior Court.

The man was pleading guilty to burglary for his July 2020 break-in at the WNB Factory, a wing and burger joint in the Baconsfield Shopping Center, when his explanation emerged.

Before he was sentenced to five years in prison for that burglary and another one the same night at a nearby dollar store, the man said that on the night of the break-ins he had been drugged and that “people” were after him.

The man said he had been at a party and that someone must have spiked his drink and dropped him off near the eatery.

He said the unnamed people were trying to kill him — “for real,” he told the judge — and that he left his ID behind so that, if he were murdered, the police would “know who I was.”

“That worked,” Judge Howard Z. Simms deadpanned. “They didn’t need Sherlock Holmes to figure this one out.”

Dispatches: A man on bicycle apparently tried to elude a Monroe County sheriff’s deputy who was on patrol in a squad car near High Falls the morning of June 4. The cyclist, 51, did not get far. After wheeling out of the parking lot at Buck Creek Market, a convenience store, an incident report noted that the man ran a stop sign and rode down the wrong side of the road before the deputy pulled in front of him. It was unclear why the man may have been trying to get away. . . . On June 5, a woman who lives on Sutton Road north of Forsyth in Monroe County reported having “had cows in (her) yard all night.” The woman, 43, told sheriff’s deputies that the cows had wandered in from a nearby pasture and damaged “multiple” items, including a propane grill, garden decorations and plants that were “eaten out of her flower pots.” There were also “bare spots,” an incident report noted, where the cows had eaten the woman’s grass “all the way to the dirt.”

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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