PUTNAM COUNTY
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Jeremy M. Thomas -
Jeremy M. Thomas
Two door-to-door salesmen picked the wrong house Saturday and ended up in the Putnam County jail.
Putnam County Sheriff Howard Sills was outside working in his yard Saturday afternoon when two men in a pickup truck pulled into his driveway.
According to Sills, their pickup was loaded with baled pine straw, and they offered to sell him some..
But Putnam’s veteran sheriff had something different on his mind. Well aware of the county’s ordinance (Section 22, Article IV) limiting door-to-door solicitation only to those with a county-issued permit, Sills said he asked the men if they had a license to solicit door-to-door.
The men said they did not.
After showing them his sheriff’s credentials, Sills told them they had to have a license to sell and because they didn’t, they would be issued a citation. He asked for the driver’s drivers license, and the driver reportedly said he didn’t have one of those, either.
Sills said he told the man to turn the truck off, and the sheriff called for a deputy to come to his residence. While they were waiting for Sgt. Justin Brock to arrrive, the driver said he needed to relieve his bladder and asked if he could do so behind a tree in Sills’ yard. Sills consented; and, when the driver got back into the pickup, he cranked the vehicle up and started backing out of the driveway.
“I ordered him to stop, but he didn’t,” Sills said.
So, Sills pulled a .38 pistol out of his pocket and fired a shot at the front tire to stop the truck. Noting that he always has the pistol with him, Sills said he was only two to three feet from the truck and the bullet struck only the tire and no one was injured. However, the driver immediately stopped the truck, and the sheriff ordered both occupants out of the truck at gunpoint. Sills said he then reached into the truck and turned off the ignition.
“I was not aiming at the driver, and I was not firing any warning shot; I was simply disabling the truck,” Sills explained.
Sgt. Brock arrived and learned both men’s identities and that one was wanted in another county.
The driver, Antoine Terrell Brown, 41, of Wadley, was charged with misdemeanor obstruction of a law enforcement officer, and driving while license withdrawn.
The passenger, Jeremy Mardise Thomas, 29, also of Wadley, was arrested on an outstanding warrant from Norcross Police Department for theft by taking.
Both men also were cited for violating the county solicitation ordinance, Sills said.
Later that day, the incident was anonymously reported to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation as an officer-involved shooting. The GBI, in turn, sent an email to Ocmulgee Judicial Circuit District Attorney T. Wright Barksdalle III, informing him about it.
Noting the DA’s office is not an investigating agency, Barksdale said he replied to the email and told the GBI that he did not know anything about the incident because Sills had not told him.
“I told them upfront that I am extremely close to the sheriff,” Barksdale explained. “And I encouraged them to contact Sills if they felt so led to look into the validity of the allegations.”
The GBI cannot conduct an independent investigation without a law enforcement agency or district attorney requesting their assistance.
Sills told this newspaper reporter that what happened was not an officer-involved shooting because he didn’t shoot anyone. He also said there is no such legal term as “officer-involved shooting.”
“That’s just something the liberal media made up,” he opined. “If Gov. Brian Kemp wants to have the GBI investigate me for this, he has the perfect legal authority to do so,” he added. “But me shooting at a tire three feet from me that’s running down my driveway is in no way the use of deadly force or anything else.”
Sills also pointed out that when law enforcement officers put Stop Sticks on a road to stop driving suspects who are fleeing them, the GBI is not notified to investigate those incidents.
The county’s ordinance requiring permits for door-to-door solicitation was updated last year because there was a series of incidents in which elderly people were being approached to have pine straw spread in their yard for $100; but after the job was completed, the resident was charged 10 times that amount, or the pine straw wasn’t delivered at all, according to Sills.
“They are targeting elderly residents and traveling all over this state doing this,” he said. “To my knowledge, we are the only county that has an ordinance like this, and we will aggressively enforce it.”