Barrow Blotter

Posted: Friday, May 13, 2011

The Barrow County Sheriff’s Office reported the following incidents:

DISPUTE: A car deal between a Winder woman and a Jefferson woman went bad when the woman who bought the car found out that the vehicle had bad head gaskets.

The buyer had put down a deposit on the car with plans to pay the balance of the sale price, which was not listed in the report, later. After paying the deposit, the buyer took the car to a mechanic who told her she would need a new head gasket.

When she asked the seller if she could return the car, the seller told her she could but she would lose her deposit. When the first payment was due, the buyer refused to pay and the seller started sending her threatening text messages, saying, “I'll hunt you down like a dog."

The buyer called Barrow County sheriff’s deputies May 9 to report the threats and the responding deputy told her the matter should be handled in civil court.

THEFT: A Statham woman called Barrow County sheriff’s deputies around 7 p.m. Monday to report that two cars had been taken from her house on Dotson Road. She believes the same person took both of them but couldn’t provide contact information for the suspect.

The suspect allegedly took two of the woman’s white Dodge Ram vans, one model year 1988, and the other, model year 1995. The woman told deputies the vans were worth $20,000.

911 CALL: A Barrow County deputy responded to a house on Carl Bethlehem Road on the afternoon of May 9 to investigate a 911 hang up call. No one was at the house when the deputy arrived, and a neighbor told him that the owner had not been around for some time.

When 911 dispatchers contacted the owner on his cell phone, he told them that his home phone had mysteriously dialed 911 by itself several times over the past few weeks. He would ask the phone company to fix the problem when he was back in town.

FIRE: A Barrow County deputy believed he might have a lead on a  copper theft when he was dispatched to suspicious fire behind a house on Broad Street in Statham around 4 p.m. May 9.

The deputy found two men standing beside a yard fire where they were burning the insulation off a ball of copper electrical wiring. Neither of the men, nor a third man who left the residence when the deputy arrived, had active warrants out for them, and Statham police officers told the deputy there had been no copper thefts in the area.

One of the men told the deputy the wire was from his father’s house. The deputy explained to the men that they looked suspicious and that it was illegal to burn anything but yard waste. He did not issue any citations.

DOMESTIC: Barrow County deputies responded to a house on Smith Mill Road in Winder around 9 p.m. May 8 after a woman dialed 911 because she and her boyfriend were having a fight over the paternity of the woman’s child.

The man told deputies he had two people call him and tell him that the woman’s baby was not his but she insisted it was his child. When he confronted her about the calls, he grabbed her hands and dug his fingernails into her wrist, she told deputies.

She dialed 911, and deputies arrested the man on family violence battery charges. The woman later told deputies that they had been together for more than six years but only moved in together seven months ago. In that time, he had grabbed or hit her five separate times, she told deputies.

ANIMAL COMPLAINT: A Hoschton man called the Barrow County sheriff’s office after he shot his neighbor’s pit bull because it cornered him in his backyard around 2 p.m. on May 8.

The neighbor admitted that she let the dog run loose to “stretch its legs,” and the shooter told a deputy that the dog was menacing his family.

His 5-year-old granddaughter was too scared to play outside. He had started taking his gun with him when he was in his backyard because he was scared of the dog.

The owner told the deputy that she understood that the dog should have been on a leash. The deputy didn’t issue any citations but told the man that he should call animal control if he has any more problems with stray dogs.  

VANDALISM: A Winder man reported that someone had carved the letters “FU” into two places on the hood of his 1997 Honda Civic while he left his car in the parking lot of the Atlanta Highway Walmart between 8 and 8:45 p.m. May 7.

He told deputies that he thought it would cost about $150 to repair the car’s paint.

SUSPICIOUS VEHICLE: A Barrow County sheriff’s deputy responded to Elder Road about midnight May 7 after Winder man visiting friends in the area called to report a suspicious four-door maroon truck on the street. He told deputies that he saw the truck driving slowly down the street, stopping for a few seconds and then continuing slowly down the street. He also saw a man in a white T-shirt he didn’t recognize running behind the houses on the street, he told the deputy.  

The deputy cruised around the neighborhood but never found the man in the white T-shirt or the maroon truck.

DOMESTIC: A Winder man called the sheriff’s office at 8:45 p.m. May 7  to report that his wife, who had been arrested on domestic violence charges a few days prior, had broken back into their house on Briarwood Drive sometime earlier that day to retrieve her belongings.

The man told the deputy that his wife could not have any contact with him as a condition of her bond, and the deputy told the man that the no-contact clause in her bond did not apply to their house.

FOUND ITEM: A Winder man called deputies around 1 p.m. May 7 after he found a U.S. cavalry officer saber inside of a brown display case nestled in the bushes in front of his hay field on Chicken Lyle Road.

He had gone to the hay field that morning to see if it needed to be cut and found the sword sticking out of a bush just inside the gate.

The man, who had never seen the saber before, wanted to turn it over to deputies in case it had been reported lost or stolen.  

DAMAGE: The county’s maintenance building at Victor Lord Park on Maynard Street in Winder suffered about $1,000 in damage over the weekend of May 7 after someone rammed into the metal structure with their car or truck.

One of the park attendants told a Barrow County sheriff’s deputy that they had seen a large white van leaving the park about 9 p.m. May 6 but they didn’t see the van’s license plates.

PROWLER: An Apalachee Church Road woman called Barrow County sheriff’s deputies to her house in Auburn around 4:35 a.m. on May 7 because her daughters and their two friends, who were staying the night, thought they heard someone outside one of their windows and running over their roof.

When the girls’ mother’s boyfriend went out to look for the prowler, he saw a grown man standing in the dark near the corner of the house. He chased him and eventually tackled him but the man ran off.

No one in the family had any ideas about who the prowler could have been.  

SHOPLIFTING: Deputies arrested a 20-year-old Winder man on shoplifting charges after a Walmart loss-prevention officer followed him around the store watching put about $300 in video games and several bottles of wine into his backpack on the evening of May 6.

The store detective called deputies while the man was in the store’s bathroom taking the plastic wrapping and security strips off of the video games. When he came out, deputies were waiting and arrested him.

One of the deputies fell and hit his head while the man was resisting arrest so the suspect also faces assault charges.

FIGHT: A sheriff’s deputy arrested two middle-aged men who had spent the afternoon drinking and arguing behind a house on Ethridge Road after one of them called 911 to report that the other would not leave the property, which belonged to the caller’s father.

When the deputy arrived, he found the man who had not called the police covered with sticks and debris because the caller had thrown him on the ground. The man who had been thrown on the ground had a long, deep scratch down his back and was angry because his shirt was ripped.

Both men continued to antagonize one another while deputies tried to interview them.  

The caller was arrested on a battery charge, for throwing his friend on the ground, and the deputy arrested the man with the ripped shirt because he had an unpaid child support warrant.

ANIMAL COMPLAINT: A Barrow County sheriff’s deputy was forced to shoot a dog who tried to attack her and another sheriff’s investigator as they tried to approach a house on Fred Kilcrease Road on the afternoon of April 6.

The deputy told her supervisors that she shot the dog, a brown Labrador mix which weighed between 60 and 70 pounds, after it charged her. The dog’s owners were cited for failing to keep the dog confined.

THEFT: A Statham woman reported that someone had stolen about $420 worth of yard equipment  from her storage shed sometime during the morning of May 6.

When she went to out to the shed around 1 p.m. that day she found that someone had pried off the pad lock and bracket that she used to keep the shed secure. The woman told deputies that someone had previously taken a riding lawn mower from her yard. She did not have any suspects.


SUSPICIOUS PERSON: A 44-year-old Winder woman called the sheriff’s office May 5 to report a suspicious flower delivery.

A delivery man dropped the flowers at her Huckleberry Lane home that afternoon with a note indicating they were from her daughter. When the woman called her daughter, she told her mother that she had not sent the flowers.

The woman has had a problems with someone stalking and harassing her in the past, and she was worried that the flowers had come from that person.


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