The Scanner: Tear Down This Wall

THAT’S COLD
It’s unclear what a man was doing when he attempted to build a wall around a Family Dollar in east Charlotte, but it’s clear he was not doing it to stay warm. The man was seen at around 11:30 p.m. on a Tuesday night removing bags of ice from the storage cooler outside of a Family Dollar on North Sharon Amity Drive and lining them up against the front door of the establishment. He continued building this Game of Thrones-esque wall of ice until it was up to 50 bags, at which time the suspect started destroying the wall like that damn zombie dragon did. The suspect took the bags from the front door and began throwing them into the parking lot, “busting and destroying the bags of ice, which eventually melted,” according to the report.

REAL CHANGE
Police were called out to protect the bourgeoisie from the words of revolutionaries on Super Tuesday, as officers reported removing a large banner from a bridge on Central Avenue looking over the ramp between Brookshire Freeway and East Independence Boulevard that was red with yellow writing that stated, “Don’t vote, start a revolution.” You could always do both.

CHIVALRY DIES
If there’s one thing The Scanner should teach us, it’s that no good deed goes unpunished. A 50-year-old man in the Hidden Valley area of north Charlotte found this out the hard way after he tried to give a woman a ride on a recent night. He told police he picked the woman up around 11:30 p.m., and just 10 minutes later, he made the mistake of leaving her in the running Hyundai Sonata while he ran into a nearby convenience store. When he got out of the store, the woman had driven off in his car.

RIDE SHARING
A 31-year-old woman also put too much trust in a stranger recently and paid dearly for it. The woman told police that she took a rideshare service from her home in north Charlotte to her son’s daycare in west Charlotte. When she arrived there, she needed to go inside to sign her son out, so she left her purse and other belongings in the car. She picked her son up and returned home and didn’t notice anything was wrong until she looked in her purse and realized $200 was missing. The woman believes that her rideshare driver went through her purse and took the cash out while she was inside the daycare.

FAKE-LY DOLLAR
Police responded to a disturbance call at a 7-Eleven in south Charlotte early one recent morning and found a man who was both a victim and a suspect. Police found a man who had tried to use a fake $50 bill at the convenience store and had been turned down by a cashier who knew better. The man said he had just received the $50 bill as change from a Family Dollar on the previous day, and was insulted to be called a counterfeiter. Police de-escalated the situation, taking the bill and telling the man he would have to go to Family Dollar to get his $50 back.

AROMA THERAPY
The great thing about renting in an apartment complex is that you can go to the leasing office whenever you like and help yourself to the things you find there. That was the attitude of one suspect in Steele Creek, who reportedly stole an air freshener machine with refills worth $250 from the clubhouse at Colonial Grand at Ayrsley at some point overnight on a recent evening.

CASH FOR CATS
An 18-year-old woman in the Idlewild South neighborhood in southeast Charlotte has found herself out of thousands of dollars, and with no cuddly pet to show for it. The woman told police she ordered a Bengal kitten from a company online, and began making financial payments for it on Feb. 28. She stated that she made several payments, but when those payments totaled up to $4,000 and the company was still demanding more without delivering the kitten, she decided maybe she’d been had.

REDNECK NECESSITIES
Police responded to a Bi-Lo on Mount Holly-Huntersville Road in northwest Charlotte after a man got violent while stealing some important things that he needed. According to the report, the man tried to leave the store with two 12-packs of Mountain Dew, a bucket of wings and a frying pan. When an employee tried to stop him, the suspect attempted to assault her then left the store.

ARSENAL
A woman called police to get rid of some property that she found in her home in north Charlotte but didn’t know where it came from. Usually, one would just throw such things away or donate them, but these were odd things to find in your home and not know it. The woman turned in a revolver, a handgun, 11 different types of ammunition, a laser sight, a holster, a towel and a lunch cooler.

WHO KNOWS
A 47-year-old man recently filed a police report after someone stole money from him while he was shopping … or so he thought. The man originally told police that someone stole $1,800 from him while he was at an Advanced Auto Parts on Milton Road in east Charlotte for two and a half hours. The next day, the man called police again and said, “Who am I to say?” The report states that “Pending further investigation, the victim stated he is unsure what happened to the money and may have left it somewhere.”

GHOST SMOKE
A woman living in the Sharon Lakes area of south Charlotte was alarmed to walk out to her car on a recent morning and find the interior of the vehicle coated in smoke. She called police and a responding officer came out to find that nobody had broken into her car as she originally believed, but that an electrical fire had started in her Volkswagen Jetta and melted the entire center console, radio and climate control unit.

REAL SMOKE
A 39-year-old southwest Charlotte man returned to his home after renting it out to some AirBnB customers recently and found that they hadn’t been respectful of his space during their four-day stay. The man told officers that his home was “permeated with an unknown smoke smell” and that his doorbell camera had been broken while he was gone.

All Scanner entries are pulled from CMPD reports. Suspects are innocent until proven guilty.

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