The Blotter December 30 2010

Your holiday binge is almost over. Yeah, it’s been fun. The weeks of debauchery, the benders with old friends, the indulgent spending sprees, the meals with enough calories to power the entire third world. Oh, the gluttony! As New Year’s Eve approaches, you prepare for that final night of reckless abandon — and then it’s resolution time. You know the drill: summon up the willpower to straighten out, break bad habits, achieve personal goals ... or not. Sometimes, resolutions just don’t pan out.

RESOLUTION NO. 1: DON’T GET MARRIED ON A WHIM: A South Carolina woman said she married an Atlanta man three months ago, left her stuff in his apartment on Peachtree Road, and went back home to get the rest of her belongings. When she returned — yep, three months later — she discovered that 150 pairs of her shoes were missing (or so she told police). The Southern-fried Imelda Marcos also claimed that 10 handbags were missing, “half real, half fake.” Her now-ex-husband said there was never that many shoes in his apartment and that she’d moved her stuff out before they divorced.

RESOLUTION NO. 2: REMEMBER, IT’S ONLY A GAME: A middle-aged man and five or six of his buddies got together for some booze, football and aggravated assault on a recent afternoon. The man told police that while they were watching the game, a fight broke out and someone stabbed him in the chest, about three inches above his heart. The man said he didn’t call police at first because he thought it would heal on its own. He finally went to the hospital when for two days he had trouble breathing. Unfortunately, the man can’t point police toward a suspect — he was so drunk he has no idea who stabbed him.

RESOLUTION NO. 3: LEARN HOW TO DRIVE: It was around 8 a.m. when an Atlanta police officer saw a brown Ford Focus run a red light at Ralph McGill Boulevard and then just stop in the middle of the intersection. “I heard several horns blowing,” the officer noted, adding that one car almost hit the Ford. The officer approached the driver, a 42-year-old woman, and asked why she’d stopped in the middle of the road. The driver balked at the insinuation that she did, well, exactly what she did, and replied, “What do you mean why was I in the intersection? That car almost hit me, and you asking me why I was in the intersection? Is you crazy?” No, but you is. She was brought jail for disorderly conduct and traffic violations.

RESOLUTION NO. 4: STOP LEAVING OBVIOUS CLUES: While parked on Virginia Avenue, a woman told police that some ravenous thief had broken her car window and stolen her lunch bag (nothing else was missing). Hungry and kind of dumb. An officer wrote: “The suspect proceeded to dump out the contents of the lunch bag in a lawn next to the vehicle. Less than six inches away from the lunch box was a yellow folded piece of paper. The paper was ripped into smaller pieces. After unfolding the paper, I observed it was a notice for trial for the Superior Court of Fulton County.” The officer could easily read the suspect’s entire last name and final two letters of his first name — “ew” — from the bits of paper, and computer check quickly revealed the suspect’s full name. Turns out the 33-year-old man is also charged with stealing from a car on North Avenue.

RESOLUTION NO. 5: BREAK UP WITH THE ASSHOLE FOR GOOD, SEEK ANGER MANAGEMENT: A feuding couple called police to their apartment on Jackson Street. The girlfriend, 19, said she was doing her hair in the bathroom, when her boyfriend burst in and demanded to know why she’d cut his phone charger cord in half. According to her, she was aggravated, so she picked up a jar of hair gel and threw it on the floor. According to him, she threw the jar of gel at his head. Things escalated — he admitted to shaking her and throwing her to the ground, but only because she was brandishing a baseball bat — and the girlfriend told police that she’d tried to call 911 at that point, but her boyfriend grabbed her phone and threw it in the closet. She said she dove into the closet after her phone, and somehow, her boyfriend ended up in the closet with her, grabbed a pair of scissors and told her to “stop talking about stupid shit.” She said her boyfriend sat on her and acted like he was going to poke her legs with scissors. Then, she said, her boyfriend got off of her and told her to clean up the hair gel. Instead, she jumped off the balcony and ran toward the apartment manager’s office. After listening to both sides, an officer concluded: “There is no evidence that would suggest that the scissors or the wooden baseball bat were used offensively during this incident.” The boyfriend and the girlfriend both went to jail — he on a battery charge, she on a simple assault charge.

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