Fresh Loaf

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES: An officer was working an extra job for Ansley Park Security Patrol when he responded to a call about an alleged theft on Inman Circle. A woman said in April or May 2009, she loaned a diamond ring to a female friend. “The ring holds sentimental value to both parties,” the officer wrote. Also, the ring is reportedly worth $27,500 and the diamond is 2.68 carats. The woman said in August 2009, she asked her friend to return the ring, but her friend refused and said, “Buy another one.” Now, her friend won’t return her calls, the woman said. She said she talked to her lawyer about the situation and she isn’t sure she wants to press charges, but she wanted an informational police report filed, because of the value of the ring. The officer gave her a case number. Her female friend lives in Smyrna.

DOWN AND OUT IN ATLANTA, PART 1: An officer dealt with a call about a homeless person sleeping in a city vehicle at Trinity Avenue and Broad Street. The officer said the homeless man exited the car and talked to two city workers who were preparing to leave. “The area in question is a fenced-in and locked parking area for City of Atlanta Planning and Research vehicles,” the officer wrote. “The vehicle is a white Taurus that is parked in a parking space.” Cardboard had been placed against the windows to prevent people from looking into the car. “The vehicle had a lot of trash, feces, urine, food, throwup, drug paraphernalia and a broken window,” the officer wrote. “The suspect advised to me that he has been sleeping in the vehicle for over a month.” The front gate was locked, but the man apparently entered through a piece of fence that was cut open. “The vehicle will be removed by city workers and attempts will be made to salvage what they can.” The homeless man, age 55, went to jail on a trespassing charge.

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SOUTHERN HOSPITALITY: A passenger reported a Florida man talking strangely on a shuttle bus at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport. The man reportedly said this was the third time Delta had made him miss his flight and made him stay overnight in Atlanta and that someone needs to blow up the airport.
A Delta Airlines employee called police, and an officer spoke with the 61-year-old man from Palm City, Fla. “I asked him if there was anything said on the shuttle bus on the way to the airport,” the officer wrote. “[The man] advised that he was mad because this was the third time Delta made him miss his flight. They made him stay in Atlanta costing him to pay for a hotel. He did say he wanted someone to blow up the airport, but he was mad and was not serious, he is just tired of Delta making him miss his flight and costing him more money. He said he was sorry and didn’t mean any harm. He will just never fly Delta and not fly through Atlanta anymore.” No charges filed.

SUNSHINE STATE STRIKES AGAIN: A 36-year-old man said he called a personal chat line while he was waiting for his cousin to pick him up from the Greyhound bus station. He said he talked with a woman he knows as “Little Florida” on the chat line — and Little Florida offered to give him a ride from the bus station if he gave her gas money. The man agreed. When Little Florida arrived, the man put all his personal belongings in her silver pickup truck and they drove away. The man said they stopped at a gas station on Northside Drive, and he went inside to pay for gas. He said while he was inside, Little Florida drove away with all his stuff. He says his stuff is worth $5,000 and Little Florida won’t return his calls.

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SPOOKY VISITOR: A 33-year-old man said he heard the doorbell ring at his home on Euclid Avenue. He saw a woman around age 30 standing outside his door, peering in his windows. He said she had blond dreadlocks and she wore black pants and a high-visibility green traffic vest. According to the man, the woman walked around to the back of his house, then she returned to the front and broke open the front door. The man said he confronted the woman and she tried to give him a piece of paper saying her name was Denise and she was looking for her stolen television. The man said he was going to call police and the woman walked away, threatening that the man’s stuff would get stolen later. The man wrote down the woman’s tag number before she drove away. Police ran a computer check on the tag — it came back on a 2009 Jeep Wrangler stolen in Atlanta. The woman reportedly caused about $500 worth of damage to the man’s front door.

JACK-O-LANTERN DENIED: Around 3 a.m., a man in a brown coat tried to buy a pumpkin and some flowers at a grocery store on Piedmont Avenue. The cashier said he couldn’t buy them because the grocery store was closed. The man reportedly got very agitated, walked outside and flung the pumpkin at the store, damaging the pumpkin. Then the man reportedly kicked the flowers. The man left on a red bicycle. Police arrived and searched the area but couldn’t find him.

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HANGING OUT: An officer saw a man — wearing a button-down shirt and “no pants, no underwear,” according to the police rport — walking down Ponce de Leon Avenue. When the man spotted the officer’s patrol car, he reportedly hid behind a bush near a clothing store. “The male hid behind the bush, peeking around and over the bush every couple of seconds,” the officer wrote. “I approached the male and he placed a black shoulder bag over his exposed genitals. I asked the male if there were any problems. He stated he was, ‘hanging out.’ I asked him why he was not wearing any pants. He stated that he ‘wasn’t prostituting.’”

The officer asked the man why he wasn’t wearing any pants or underwear. The man said his pants were ripped while he was at a club on 10th Street. The man said he just left the club, but the officer noted that the club closes at 2:30 a.m. — and it was now 5:47 a.m.

The officer wrote, “I asked him to place the ripped pants back on his body — he took two pair of pants out of his bag. Neither pair was ripped in any way as to cause the gentleman’s genitalia to be exposed.” The officer asked the man again: What’s wrong with your pants? “He stated that they were ripped ‘at the bottom of the pant legs at the cuff,’” the officer wrote. “At this point, the male stated, ‘Take me to jail.’”

The 38-year-old man was charged with indecency and carrying a concealed weapon because he allegedly had a straight razor. He went to jail.

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Last week, state Insurance Commissioner John Oxendine was touting a Rasmussen poll that indicated he was leading the GOP race for governor — with a solid 10 months to go before the primary, mind you.

Well, now the Ox is trumpeting another poll, this one by San Diego-based Strategic Vision, that again shows him with a comfortable lead. According to the results, Oxendine is polling at 39 percent — more than the five other Republican candidates put together. The undecideds come in at about 25 percent.

Just like last time, Oxendine’s campaign manager Tim Echols claims his candidate is “humbled by these results,” which I don’t believe for an instant.

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FANCY WINE BROUHAHA: A man with a blondish mohawk and a 20-year-old woman walked into a grocery store on Piedmont Avenue. Store employees say the man went to the wine section and grabbed a $130 bottle of wine. He reportedly handed the wine to the woman and she went to the customer service desk and tried to fraudulently return the wine. Employees told the woman that she couldn’t return the wine — so she left the bottle at the customer service desk. At the same time, employees were quizzing the man about the wine. “Kroger employees ran after [the man] saying they had been robbed,” an officer wrote. The man and woman hopped into a Ford Ranger and drove away. As police arrived, nearby citizens said the Ford Ranger had smashed through a garage security gate at a Buckhead condominium on Peachtree Street.

So police went to the condo building. A woman there said the couple ditched the car and ran into the condo building. She said the man wore black nylon shorts and a black T-shirt and the woman wore a white T-shirt and brown pants.

Police surrounded the condo building and eventually the woman walked out. An officer found the man hiding in the lobby stairwell. “They had exchanged clothing and [the man] had cut all his hair off,” an officer wrote. During a police interview, the couple admitted they went to the grocery store to fraudulently return stuff for money. They also said they had exchanged clothes while they were inside an elevator at the condominium building. An officer wrote, The man also admitted, “he knocked on a resident’s door and asked for a pair of scissors and cut his hair.”

The man and woman went to jail on numerous charges.

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CATNAP? On Pharr Road, a woman called police to report her cat missing. An officer arrived. The woman said she “has not seen her cat in several days and believes that one of her neighbors inside her apartment complex has kidnapped the cat,” the officer wrote. Also, the woman said the same neighbor confronted her and said she knew the woman has “herperies,” the officer wrote. The woman said she didn’t know how her neighbor could know that information about her. The woman “stated that she previous left her personal phone books outside her apartment on her patio, which is an open area next to a bus stop near [her] apartment,” the officer wrote. “[She] stated she found a small knife laying on her patio table when she returned to pickup her telephone book. When I inquired about the knife, [the woman] got the knife from her kitchen drawer and showed the knife to me.” The woman said she thinks her neighbor has it out for her. The officer couldn’t locate the suspected neighbor. The woman insisted on filing a police report.

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CRANKY MOMMA: A police officer responded to a call about a dispute on Pineview Terrace. “This was the fifth time since [2:30 p.m.] I had responded to this address regarding this caller and the ninth time since 10 a.m. the suspect had called 911,” the officer noted.
The caller said she wanted her son to leave her house. “The son, who lives at the residence, advised me he has lived there for 30 years,” the officer noted. The son provided valid ID showing his address. His mother said she was tired of the son living there. The officer explained the proper steps to evict someone: Go to the Fulton County Courthouse and start the process. The mother said she was going tomorrow. “I advised her that there was no criminal activity and that she needed to stop calling 911,” the officer noted. The mother said she was drinking Seagram’s gin all day and “I’m 77 years old, I drink it cause I paid for it.” She kept abusing 911, the officer noted. So the officer charged the 77-year-old mother with disorderly conduct under the influence and took her to jail.

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SEEING RED: At Underground Atlanta, a security guard said he saw a man take a ketchup container and squirt ketchup on the mall’s sign. The man said he could not clean up the mess and would do it again if not stopped, according to the police report. “Tomato ketchup was squirted all over the Underground mall sign,” the officer noted. The man, age 34, was arrested for disorderly conduct.

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BUGGED OUT: Around 9:30 a.m., a woman said a bee flew into her car while she was using her access card to enter a parking lot on Peachtree Street. “As she was swiping the bee out of the car, she did not realize how close she was to the card reader,” a police officer wrote. “As she drove off, her left-side mirror hit and knocked out the card reader.” Damage to her car: $200. Damage to the card reader: $300. Damage to the bee: unknown.

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WISHFUL THINKING: An officer saw a man on the Freedom Parkway ramp to I-75/85. The man reportedly was walking back and forth, asking for money from drivers. Apparently, as the officer circled around, the man moved to the Ellis Street ramp. “[He] had previously fled from me into the Auburn Avenue area, so I snuck up behind him and took him into custody without incident,” the officer wrote. “[The man] said I must be following him and that his uncle in the FBI was watching traffic cameras in the area, so once Mayor Shirley Franklin was fired for ‘taking that money’ all the police would be fired and they would close the jail.” The officer arrested the 49-year-old man and he “was transported to jail, which remains open.”

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BIG DAY WITH BJ: A man said he and his wife were kidnapped at gunpoint one morning — and they were forced to get in a blue van and held in Piedmont Park until almost 11 p.m., when the man escaped. He said the kidnappers still had his wife — and he was able to escape because the alleged kidnappers, BJ and another guy, slapped him and got distracted when a police car drove by.

An officer asked, “What did the kidnappers want?” The man said he didn’t know, but they made them sit on this blanket all day with ants crawling around.

The officer asked the man if he could describe the weapon. “[He] said there were so many guns around and so many people,” the officer wrote. “I asked [him] how many kidnappers there were and he said two.”

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CLOTHES ENCOUNTERS: A 24-year-old man wearing a dress allegedly shoplifted from a drugstore on Boulevard. According to a security guard, the man concealed a soap-and-body-wash set inside his bag. The security guard said he tried to stop the man – but he ran out of the drugstore, along with a woman. The guard said he hopped in his car and caught them about a block away – but the man passed his bag to the woman, and she disappeared between some houses. Apparently, the man took off his dress, threw a rock at the guard’s car, and ran into Zoo Atlanta. Eventually, police caught the man and took him to jail.

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They’re back, Atlanta. And this time, they’re prepared for your childish antics.

While the April 15 Atlanta Tea Party protest in front of the Georgia Capitol included Sean Hannity, local politicos and quite a bit of traffic, what the organizers didn’t necessarily account for beforehand was the sophomoric glee with which anchors and guests on major news networks, including CNN’s Anderson Cooper, would greet their declared intent to “teabag the White House.”

Tea Party April 15 at the Georgia state capitol

According to a press release issued by the Tea Party Patriots early this week, announcing their intended demonstration outside CNN headquarters today from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.:

CNN poked fun at and demeaned the Tea Party Patriots Protesters around the country on April 15th. …  The repeated use of sexual innuendo and other offensive language primarily centered around an alternate meaning of the word “teabagging” were insulting, rude, and lacked the decorum expected of a professional news organization.

Content like this is not family friendly.  As parents, we are outraged that your network incorporated these sexual innuendos and other offensive language into your news content as if they didn’t matter.

Though the Tax Day protests drew anywhere between 10,000 and 20,000 attendees (and Sean Hannity!), there was no sign of any demonstrators early this afternoon at CNN — and nary an indication that they even briefly distracted the hordes of summer campers and tourist groups that normally mill around the CNN Center.

Regardless of how many enthused teabaggers actually were offended by CNN’s coverage of their event, it rings a tad hollow, given that many of the most hilariously suggestive parodies came from the teabaggers themselves — such as the sign held up by 38-year-old medical professional Christian Stevens last April 15 in front of the Capitol:

“Stimulus check: $20.32. KY Jelly: $20.32. Coincidence? I don’t think so.”

(Photo by Joeff Davis)

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On Saturday night, Sin City Fight Club presented “Showdown at Center Stage,” an evening of cage-fighting. The main event was the most violent of the night — a match between 34-year-old Dymond Jones and 22-year-old Clint Hester.

While the amateur fights during the evening featured offense and defense, the Hester vs. Jones fight was more like offense and offense, with both fighters meeting in a flurry of punches. Jones — twelve years older and twenty pounds lighter — got the worst of it, at one point finding himself on the delivery end of several punches to the head while pinned to the floor. Hester knocked out Jones with 30 seconds left in the second round. “He hit damn hard,” said Jones, when reached by phone on Monday. “He got big ass hands.”

Dymond Jones on the ground during his bout with Clint Hester

“You always think right when you get into the ring, ‘What am I here for again?’ You do it because you want to, but you know someone’s gonna do harm to you,” Jones said, still nursing a minor concussion two days after the fight. “I am thinking about retiring,” he added, “but you don’t want to retire after a loss.”

More photos of “Showdown at Center Stage“

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AFTER-SCHOOL SPECIAL: A mother’s kids didn’t return home from school one day. (They attend a local elementary school.) The mother said her kids weren’t at their school bus stop on Oak Street, so she started searching for them. She said she found her kids at another bus stop three blocks away. While she was there, she found a 6-year-old boy – and he said this isn’t his regular bus stop and he didn’t know where he was. The woman took the boy home and called 911, the elementary school and police. A school employee arrived and called the lost boy’s mother – and she quickly came to collect her son. According to the police officer’s report, the mothers told police “that this was not the first time this happened and that their kids have been dropped off several times at the wrong locations.”

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GRABBING GRANNY: A 73-year-old woman said a man grabbed her right buttock while she was walking on University Avenue. Then, the man reportedly stuck out his tongue at her, grabbed his crotch and shook it. The suspect — a 38-year-old man — had a mohawk haircut and glasses, and he was wearing a tan camouflage jacket, denim shorts, a fanny pack and a visor. The elderly woman told two witnesses what happened — and they stopped the suspect and took him to a nearby church. That’s when police arrived. “The suspect made an outburst that he was sorry for grabbing the victim,” the officer wrote. He went to jail on a simple battery charge.

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THROWING MONEY AROUND: A 19-year-old woman from Rex said she went through a toll booth on Ga. 400 one evening. She said her passenger (a 19-year-old man) got out of the car, put 50 cents in the toll basket and they drove on. A little farther down the road, the male passenger “noticed that the $7,649 was missing, so they got off at Exit 4/Glenridge Connector and turned around and went back to the toll booth,” an officer wrote. According to a toll-booth employee, a woman in a white car said there was money on the ground — and she showed him the money and drove away. He said, “some of the money was in one pile and that some more of the money was blowing around and that he picked up some of the money, but the female never gave him any money. [He] then turned the money in to his boss.”
The woman got $4,520 back — but she’s still missing $3,129. An officer wrote, “When I asked if they could review the security camera [a manager] stated that he was unable to review then and they would have to wait til the day shift manager came in.”

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Fox News anchor Shepard Smith said yesterday "We are AMERICA! We do not fucking torture!!"

>> WTF: First-time homebuyers and “investors” are setting off bidding wars on foreclosed homes. Something about that is just wrong.

>> Purchase of the morning-after pill by 17-year-olds has been approved by the FDA. As with any decision ever made in America, some people are ecstatic, some people are pissed.

>> SCARY: Taliban forces march ever-closer to the capital of nuclear-armed Pakistan, with the government seeming to offer little resistance.

>> China flexes its monetary muscles through loans to struggling countries like Jamaica.

>> WORD UP: The lone voice of sanity on Fox News, Shepard Smith, speaks: “I don’t give a rat’s ass if it helps. We are AMERICA! We do not fucking torture!!”

>> ‘Tis a mutiny, ARRRRGH: Pirate Bay lawyer calls for a retrial as judge presiding over the case belongs to a pro-copyright lobby group.

>> Top MySpace execs are on their way out. Does this mean new sign-ups for the site won’t be greeted by Tom as their first friend?

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HAIR TODAY, GONE TOMORROW: A woman said she and her boyfriend went out drinking on a Sunday night. “The two of them had a conversation about trust, when [the boyfriend] convinced [her] to let him use her Wachovia bank card to get $40,” an officer wrote. When he returned from the ATM, she asked for her card back, but he allegedly refused to return it. Then, she said, the boyfriend pulled off her wig — and returned to an ATM and took all her money — $320.  Continue reading Blotter.

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SEEING BLOODY RED: At Chastain Square Shopping Center on Roswell Road, a 29-year-old woman said she went to the Dumpster to throw away some cardboard and discovered a box on the ground filled with bloody clothes. So she called police. An officer arrived to investigate. “As I approached the box, I noticed what appeared to be bloody clothing inside,” the officer wrote. Then, he looked closer. “The suspected blood appeared to be some type of red syrup. It also had a sweet smell to it. … To make sure that the substance was not blood, I [got] an ID unit to come out and take pictures of the scene before I started removing contents of the box.” After photos, the officer fully opened the box. “Inside the box was a plastic fake head, pants, a white shirt, and rubber flies and worms. It appeared that someone may have used the items to advertise a game of some sort. The reason for this assumption is because I also found a Chinese to-go box with a bloody fake hand inside. On the box, it advertised a game called ‘Grand Theft Auto in China.’ The game is believed to be full of blood and gore from the display on the box.” The officer discarded the fake bloody contents and filed a police report.

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WOMEN GONE WILD: Two officers responded to a fight call on Cushman Circle and found several women engaged in a verbal spat. A 25-year-old woman reportedly threw something upstairs, trying to hit a 27-year-old woman. One officer grabbed the 25-year-old woman, and the other officer was trying to help when “a puddle of water came pouring down on myself and [the other officer] from upstairs. We were drenched in what appeared to be bleach, but as it turns out, the liquid was only water poured from a bleach bottle.” Police gave both women tickets for disorderly conduct. Apparently, the argument extended to the 25-year-old woman’s mother. She allegedly burned the other woman “with fire on her hand,” police wrote. Also, a man said he was walking his dog, when the mother shouted at him and pointed a sharp object in his face. Apparently, the man’s wife sprayed the mother with pepper spray. The 60-year-old mother went to a psychiatric ward.

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FASHION STATEMENT: A 50-year-old man said he has been staying at a hotel on Northside Drive in the Castleberry Hill district for an extended period of time. “[He] stated that he feels that someone is coming into his room and wearing his clothes and then returning his clothes unwashed,” an officer wrote. There were no signs of forced entry to his hotel room.

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TROUBLE ON WISTERIA LANE: A middle-aged woman said her car alarm went off around midnight on Wisteria Lane. She said she went outside and saw someone running away in the distance. She has “high suspicion” of the suspect’s identity — a man known as “Pooh.” (And Pooh is described as a man about 6-feet-2-inches tall with short hair.) She said Pooh is a known person who breaks into cars and houses in the area. Police lifted two sets of fingerprints from the woman’s Cadillac.

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Today marks the sixth anniversary of the Iraq war. Since it began on March 19, 2003 the war has cost the United States more than $600 billion dollars, with an estimated $440 to $865 billion expected to be spent in the next 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

President Barack Obama calls for 127,000 troops to remain in Iraq until the end of this year, and for 50,000 troops to remain at least until the end of 2011.

More than 4,250 American troops have died since the start of the war, and another 36,000 were wounded. For Iraqis, the toll has been much higher, with an estimate of more than 91,000 Iraqi civilians killed. What’s more, water in Baghdad is still mostly undrinkable.

Today in Atlanta there are several events to mark the anniversary. At 3 p.m., there will be a forum at Georgia State University in room 24 of GSU’s Aderhold Learning Center at 60 Luckie Street. Speakers include Iraqi native Raed Jarrar, a war expert, and Jason Hurd, the southeast regional director of Iraq Veterans Against the War.  At 5 p.m., there will be a march led by veterans. The march will leave Woodruff Park at 5 p.m. and end at the CNN Center.  The day will end with a free concert at 8 p.m. at Metropolitan Warehouses, 675 Metropolitan Parkway (fishmarket D-125) with music by Futureshock, the Black Pockets, Contraverse and the Wild.

(Photo by Joeff Davis)

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