The following were taken from actual incident reports filed last week by the City of Charleston Police Department. These are not convictions and the names of businesses, complainants, and suspects have been left out to protect the innocent. All suspects are innocent until proven guilty … of course.
February 6 | GENERAL INFORMATION
Police received a call from a West Ashley mother that her missing teen daughter and granddaughter were in a car in front of her in traffic along Sam Rittenberg Boulevard. The high school-aged mother had been reported missing for the past two weeks from where she attends school in the Atlanta area. When police stopped the younger mom’s car, she expressed confusion as to why her own mother had called the police on her. The older mother and another witness on the scene told police that the teen mom had been showing signs of mental illness, but neither would take custody of her grandchild, preferring it be turned over to the care of the state’s Department of Social Service. The father of the granddaughter was informed as to the situation, and was in route from his home in Virginia to take the child.
February 6 | SIMPLE ASSAULT
Police responded to a request for help along Hazelwood Drive where a man was walking down the middle of Hazelwood Drive, refusing to get out of the way of vehicular traffic. Despite repeated yelling and honking from motorists blocked behind him, the man continued to walk down the middle of the street. An officer pulled up and got out of his cruiser and began to approach the man, who then began to yell and scream at the officer to “get off the yard.” Soon, not only the man but his family was yelling over the officer’s attempt to remedy the situation. Then, the man threw a closed fist punch and struck the officer in the face and was arrested.
February 6 | DRUGS, NARCOTICS VIOLATION
Officers responded to a report of a disturbance at a Savannah Highway hotel between a man and an increasingly bizarre woman. As the man was leaving the building, he told police his girlfriend had tried to stop him and had thrown food at him as he left. The man also said she had grabbed his suitcase out of his hand as he attempted to enter an elevator, and police found the man’s personal items on the floor of the elevator. During a frisk search, police found the man was carrying marijuana and a small collection of pills. But, while interviewing the woman, police heard a host of different stories. At first, the woman said she was uncomfortable around men in uniform because she had been raped by law enforcement in California, and that she was pregnant with her assailant’s child. She then changed her story to say she was pregnant with her boyfriend’s child, and that he was going to kill her and place her in the suitcase. She also stated that she was the victim of human trafficking and her boyfriend had brought her to Charleston against her will. The woman was given an appointment with local mental health workers, and the man said he was flying back to California.
February 7 | DISORDERLY CONDUCT
Police filed criminal charges against a child at a local middle school after the child ran wild in the halls for over 30 minutes, causing a lockdown of the school. The child had earlier struck another student in the face in the cafeteria, and refused to leave a lunch table until running outside into the courtyard. The child then began running through the halls of the school, yelling and laughing, spewing racial slurs toward other students. The child’s mother was eventually able to take the child off school grounds.
February 8 | VANDALISM
A Savannah Highway car dealership manager complained to police that a homeless man with a white beard and long hair had been entering cars on the lot at night and sleeping in them until morning. They found that a glove box in one of the cars had been damaged.
February 8 | SIMPLE ASSAULT
A Balsam Street grandfather told police that two adults and two teenagers attacked him after he retrieved his grandson’s bicycle from one of the teens, causing him to fall to the ground and break his elbow. The grandfather said the group hit him numerous times once he was on the ground. A man living across the street from the grandfather who witnessed the fight but claimed not to have taken part in it, said the teenager who had the bike was his nephew. The man added that the grandfather had “jacked him up” when he took back the bike, but did not elaborate about what happened after that.
