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Facebook relation turns sour after meeting
Crime reports for Aug. 25
crime scene

A Richmond Hill Police Department officer was patrolling Highway 144 near the Fish Hatchery shortly after midnight Aug. 13 when he spotted “a sedan travelling in front of my vehicle having difficulty maintaining its lane,” a report said. “The vehicle was observed moving from the right edge of its lane to the left edge. It continued this manner of driving continuously. Based on my training and experience with subjects driving while intoxicated, swerving within a lane is a cue for a driver operating a vehicle while intoxicated.”
So, the officer pulled the car over and told the driver why he’d pulled her over.  It turned out “she’d just gotten off work … and was eating a meal while driving,” the report said, noting the woman showed no signs of being intoxicated. She did have a suspended license, however. She was arrested, cited and given a court date, then released to her mom.
 Different case: Around 2 a.m. on Aug. 13 an RHPD officer spotted a car in the parking lot at El Cheapo at Sommers Boulevard with a “driver passed out behind the steering wheel with the drivers door open and her left leg hanging out the vehicle,” a report said.
The officer stopped, and “shook (the driver) until she awoke,” then “asked (driver) to turn the vehicle off, to which she turned the radio all the way up. I then learned the vehicle was in drive and her right foot was on the brake pedal. I reached inside the vehicle and turned the ignition off.”
The officer then tried to find out where the woman was headed, but “she was very confused and would not give an answer.”
Because the officer smelled alcohol, he asked the woman to step out of the car. She did.
“I asked (the woman) how many alcoholic beverages she had consumed to which she replied ‘beer.’”
The woman was apparently unable to stand up on her own and blew a .228 on the field breath test, and was so ripped the officer took her on in to the station. “(No) other field sobriety tests were conducted for safety reasons,” the report said. She was charged with a BAC of  blood alcohol content of .199.

Matter of record
This one’s kind of scary. Or weird. A truck driver told a Bryan County Sheriff’s Department deputy he was heading south on I-95 on Aug. 5 around 1:30 a.m. when someone threw “an object from the (Belfast Siding) overpass which struck his vehicle.”
Though the driver didn’t notice damage at first, when he stopped in Midway he found some.  The man told the deputy he believes the object was a “cantaloupe” and that though the damage was minimal his company wanted him to make a report.

Property damage
The thing about owning vehicles is things happen to them. Like the following:
A Richmond Hill Police Department officer was dispatched to a Sterling Links Way address on Aug. 4 regarding a woman who reported that said “at some point today she believes (her vehicle) may have been involved in a hit and run.”
In other words, someone hit her pickup. The report said the woman had made a number of stops around Richmond Hill between 8 a.m. and 10 a.m., including two residences, two banks, the Post Office and Krogers. The woman said she didn’t notice the damage until she got to work. The report said there was a deep scratch on the door from the driver’s door to the back wheel well.
And then there’s this report from Aug. 4 in which a woman at the T/A Travel Center reported to RHPD she was headed south around 8:20 p.m. when “a large piece of metal fell off a nearby tractor trailer and into her lane of travel.”
The metal hit the rental car the woman was driving, causing damage.
The driver of the truck was also there, and said his rig had been serviced at the truck stop and a metal cover had not been reattached, causing it to fly off and damage the car.
And then there’s this: On Aug. 8 police were sent to the Richmond Hill Library regarding a vehicle with a busted window. The woman, apparently a library employee, said it happened at some point during the day, and police determined it looked as if the window had been “struck by a small projectile (possibly a BB).” The officer checked out the area and found no other windows had been shot.


Simple battery
An RHPD officer was sent to the McDonald’s on Highway 17 around 6:30 p.m. to meet a woman who had quite a tale to tell.
The woman said “two years ago she befriended (suspect) on Facebook and a month ago they decided to meet in person,” the report said.
So, the woman said she came to Georgia to “spend a month or so” with the suspect, but “she became disillusioned when (he) began having her pay all the bills and asking her for money,” the report continued.
Things apparently came to a boil Aug. 4 when he hit her in the face, the woman said, so she packed up and left. But the officer noted he saw “no marks or signs of trauma of any kind,” on the woman’s face.
The woman wanted the man arrested, but the officer explained “we could not arrest him based solely upon her word. I told her I would document the incident and she could take that to the magistrate judge and pursue warrant procedures there,” the report said.
The woman was given the case number and told how to get a copy of the report, and she said she was through with the man and would “find another motel to stay in tonight before returning to California.”
As the one officer spoke with the woman, two other officers found the suspect staying at the Quality Inn.
He said the woman “had promised to come to Georgia and help him with his fledgling insurance business, but once she got here all she did was lay around by the pool,” the report said. The man said he helped her get a refund from the motel, helped her load her car and she left. He also denied hitting her.


Matter of Record
A River Oaks man reported Aug. 9 his chimney was struck by lightning.
“I observed several bricks on the ground behind his residence and later observed the damage from outside,” an RHPD officer reported. “The chimney was struck approximately three or four feet below the topmost portion on what appeared to be the east side of the chimney.”
There was no other damage, and the officer also noted firefighters had already been by to make sure there was interior damage or fire.

Warrant
Shortly after midnight on Aug. 14 an RHPD officer was at the Waffle House near the Travel Lodge when he spotted a man come in the restaurant whom the officer was aware was wanted for a probation violation.
“I approached (the man) and advised him of the warrant. (The man) had just received his meal that he had already ordered. (The man) was allowed to eat his meal while I waited for (another officer) to respond from the police department with a copy of the warrant.”
The man was then arrested.

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