The Blotter: Satan on aisle 3

Near Roseland Cemetery, a man dressed entirely in black who was riding a bicycle rolled up to a grocery store. After parking his bike, the man went into the store, walked down an aisle, and then became very aggressive and angry with store employees. He screamed, “I’ll kill you. I have a gun bigger than me,” and “I’ll kill you and go to hell and make the devil suck his own dick. Fuck you.” Apparently, the bicycle man has a weird fascination with this particular grocery store. For the past few months, he repeatedly rides his bike there and makes strange threats and causes trouble even though the owners got a trespassing warning against him months ago. Police showed up and carted off the man, 44, to jail.

MOVIE MADNESS: A totally wasted man went crazy near a Kirkwood apartment complex. He was yelling and screaming at people and tearing up office furniture in the lobby. The man said that earlier, he and a young woman were watching a movie with friends in the apartment recreation room. He believes the woman put something in his drink that made him go crazy, causing him to start physical fights with everyone watching the movie. Cops arrived and talked to the woman and she had no idea why her movie date suddenly snapped. The man told police he’d drank about a fifth of gin and vodka. He went to jail on a disorderly conduct charge. The woman got a police report to show her apartment manager, so hopefully she doesn’t get tossed out for bringing such a weird guest to movie night.

BUDGET STOPGAP? In Castleberry Hill, a woman was chatting on her cell phone while driving her silver SUV. Suddenly, a cop pulled her over. The cop said he was ticketing her because she did not stop at a stop sign on Fair Street. The woman said, “Oh yes I did stop.” The cop noted, “I told her she did not stop, but what she did was commonly known as a rolling stop, and I also explained to her that there is no such thing as a rolling stop.” Also, the officer said her “tires did not stop moving at the stop sign.” The woman unloaded a tirade: “All y’all do is harass people. This is a money thing. What about all these drug dealers around here? Y’all don’t mess with them because you scared of them.” The officer made things worse by getting the woman’s name wrong when he asked her to sign her ticket. The woman hollered, “That’s not my name! You don’t even know my own name!” The woman kept arguing, but nothing was going to get her out of the ticket.

CAVEMAN INSTINCT: In downtown Atlanta, two grown men were brawling in the middle of Marietta Street around 11 a.m. Cops broke up the smackdown. An officer asked the men what was wrong. One brawler, a 34-year-old man, said the other guy started the fight over a lighter. The other brawler, a 40-year-old man, said that’s news to him — he didn’t know the melee started over a lighter. In fact, he had no idea why they started throwing punches in the first place. Both men went to jail on disorderly conduct charges.

GESTATION FRUSTRATION: A 24-year-old woman said she and her ex-boyfriend argued over her pregnancy papers. She wanted him to return her pregnancy papers so she could apply for food stamps. (She says she’s six weeks pregnant and he’s the lucky dad.) The ex-boyfriend refused to turn over her pregnancy papers, so she tracked him down at his new apartment on Continental Colony Parkway. Her fury amplified when she peered through a window and saw her ex-boyfriend cavorting with two other women in the apartment. The pregnant woman cursed, yelled, and screamed, demanding her pregnancy papers. When that didn’t work, she “punched out a window.” That got his attention; the ex-boyfriend walked outside wielding a baseball bat. A neighbor called police and the argument quickly de-escalated. The woman got her pregnancy papers and told the cops she’s just fine now.

GUNS & NICOTINE: A 22-year-old woman and 31-year-old man moved into an upscale apartment in the Old Fourth Ward. Three months later, their relationship collapsed. The girlfriend told police that her boyfriend recently quit smoking and he is so irritable that they just keep squabbling. She said that one night he became so agitated she decided to hide his gun and keys under the pillowcase in their bedroom. She said the boyfriend followed her and tried to grab for his gun and keys and they got into a shoving match.

The boyfriend’s side of the story: Nicotine withdrawal is not the problem. He says his girlfriend is just plain “crazy.” He said the fight started because he tried to use her computer and she said no and turned it off. He said his girlfriend is so crazy that once he found his gun under the pillowcase, he decided to remove all of the bullets just to keep things safe. After the scuffle, he says he walked outside and threw his gun down a sewer drain.

Cops didn’t know who to believe. So the man and woman both went to jail on simple battery charges.

WEBSITE FAIL: A 47-year-old Sandy Springs man said he hired a guy to develop a website for him, paying him $500. The website guy started the job and then went to jail — long before the website was even close to being completed. So the Sandy Springs man decided to find someone else to finish the website. After a few weeks, the website developer got out of jail, called him up, and demanded more money. No way, said the Sandy Springs man. Now he can’t shake the website guy, who he says is stalking him at the coffee shop he hangs out at in North Buckhead and sending him threatening texts.

Items in the Blotter are taken from actual Atlanta police reports. The Blotter Diva compiles them and puts them into her own words.