Macon man says God told him to torch drug dealer’s pickup truck

The pickup truck was in flames. It was the middle of the night and the white 1998 GMC Sonoma was burning in the backyard at a house on Killarney Circle in south Bibb County. The place lies below Griffin and Barnes Ferry roads, northeast of Middle Georgia Regional Airport on the east side of Ga. 247. A Bibb sheriff’s deputy sent to the check on the blaze the night of April 28 saw a man next to the truck with a water hose. The guy was trying to put out the fire. The deputy asked the man how the fire started. “He told me to do it,” the man, 41, replied. When the deputy asked the man who had told him to burn the truck, the man answered, “God.” The man, according to the deputy’s write-up, went on to explain how he had “doused the truck with gas and then lit it with his lighter.” The man added that “his wife of three years … has been talking to a gentleman,” a fellow who also happened to be the owner of the burning pickup. “He went on to say that (the truck’s owner) is a drug dealer and that he got (the wife) hooked on meth.” The man in the yard said the truck’s owner had left it with the man, apparently a mechanic, to rebuild the pickup’s engine. But the truck had been there for months and the angry husband said the pickup’s owner owed $650 for the engine repair. The husband told the deputy “that he was hurt and that setting (the) truck on fire would be the only way to get back” at the other man for “non-payment and the courting of his wife.” The husband was jailed on an arson charge.

This story was originally published May 18, 2016 at 12:00 AM with the headline "Macon man says God told him to torch drug dealer’s pickup truck."