Report: Macon Wal-Mart mob wanted to see how much damage it could do
Surveillance video of a wee-hours ruckus at a Macon Wal-Mart on Sunday shows a teenager race inside flashing gang signs ahead of a mob of four dozen or so people who burst in and smashed merchandise.
The commotion, which caused an estimated $2,000 in damage, appears to have been planned.
Some in the crowd also snatched a man, apparently a shopper at the Zebulon Road store, from a motorized shopping cart and dragged him to the floor, Bibb County sheriff’s officials said Monday.
The vandals, said to number between 40 and 50, sprinted down the store’s main aisle about 1:50 a.m. Sunday, “destroying merchandise displays and items,” a sheriff’s deputy’s report of the incident noted.
Floors in parts of the store were “coated with broken merchandise,” the report added. “The length of the store from front to rear was lined with items which had been shattered, destroyed, turned over and thrown about.”
When sheriff’s deputies got there, the crowd “began to flee into many different vehicles and leave the scene,” the report said.
The store, next to Lowe’s, is just east of Interstate 475 in one of the area’s most frequented shopping districts.
The teenager seen leading the rushing horde of young men and women told a Wal-Mart employee “that this was a planned event ... to see how much damage they could cause,” the sheriff’s report said.
The teen, identified as 17-year-old Kharron Nathan Green, of Ashton Drive in northwest Bibb County, was arrested when he returned to the store to retrieve his cellphone.
Green was jailed and later released on bond after being charged with inciting a riot and second-degree damage to property.
Green, according to the sheriff’s report, first told cops that “he did not know anything about what had happened in the store and that he did not know anyone involved.”
But when his mother and father arrived and watched the surveillance footage with sheriff’s deputies, the report said “Green admitted to his parents that the male in the video was indeed him.”
He refused to name others in the crowd, but according to the report said they had all come from a party on the city’s south side.
“Hopefully we can identify the others,” Sheriff David Davis said Monday. “Hopefully it’s not a pattern of behavior.”
Davis wondered about the parental supervision of the young people involved.
“Due to the lateness of the hour,” he said, “I don’t know that they were going to be going to church the next morning.”
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