Crime & Safety

Waffle House Thief Returns Money, Lands in Jail

Memorial Drive incident just one of several weird crimes reported by Atlanta police this past week.

Atlanta police say a Decatur woman who posed as a Waffle House manager and snatched $100 cash from the register on Wednesday returned to the Memorial Drive restaurant hours later to return the money.

But she got more than she bargained for as Katie Marie McCrary, 35, was arrested and booked into the DeKalb County jail on a misdemeanor charge of theft by taking.

According to Officer Kim Jones, shortly after 6 a.m. on Feb. 26, McCrary entered the Waffle House located at 2914 Memorial Drive dressed in a Waffle House uniform.

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Stating that she was a relief manager, McCrary first inspected a restaurant bathroom and then began to withdraw money from a register to take to another store. Waffle House employees soon realized that she was not following store procedures and requested McCrary to contact the district manager.  

At that point, she exited the store with the money and left in an SUV driven by someone else.

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A couple of hours later, McCrary returned to the restaurant and told employees that she took the money and wanted to return it. On her second visit, she was arrested.

Jones said investigators do not believe McCrary is or was a Waffle House employee.

The Nicest Carjackers Ever in Buckhead

Atlanta police say a false report of a Buckhead carjacking landed an allegedly impaired man in jail early Sunday morning.

According to Officer John Chafee, at around 5:20 a.m. on Feb. 23, a responding officer found an “extremely intoxicated” man at the intersection of Northside Parkway and West Paces Ferry Road.

The man told police he was stopped at a stop sign, somewhere on Howell Mill Road, when “two white males jumped out of the bushes and instructed him to give them his 2001 Mercedes S430.”

Noticing that the man had two large bags, his cell phone and his wallet, the officer asked the man why the carjackers had allowed him to take his possessions with him? When the man, whose “eyes were glassy” and speech “slurred,” failed to provide a plausible answer to that and several ensuing questions, the officer began to believe the man was lying about the alleged crime.

The man then guided himself and the officer to the nearby intersection of Howell Mill and Wellesley Drive where they found the vehicle with extensive damage to the front of passenger side and two flat tires on driver’s side as if it had been in an accident.

When the officer asked the man how he knew where his car was, he replied, "I didn't know, you just found it."

The police narrative also notes that a piece of the front bumper was placed in the rear seat of the car and that a spare tire had been removed from the trunk as if someone was going to change one of the tires. Noticing the man’s hands were covered in dirt, “as if he had been handling pieces from underneath his vehicle or the spare tire,” the officer again asked the man to be truthful as to what had happened.

After sticking by his carjacking story with numerous responses, the man said he could not go to jail because he has a pending domestic violence case and to “just forget the whole thing” and he would call his insurance company in the morning.

The officer finally gave up on the supposed charade, and told the man that he believed he made up the “incident to cover up a traffic accident he was involved in and to avoid a DUI arrest.” The man was charged with city ordinance 106-90 providing false information to an officer and transported to jail.

Cooling Off in Downtown

During the early morning hours of Feb. 21, Atlanta police officers were dispatched to an indecent exposure call in downtown at the intersection of Peachtree Street and Carnegie Way.

According to Chafee, upon arrival, officers were told by witnesses that a naked man was running down Peachtree towards Andrew Young International Boulevard.

When officers caught up with the man, they found him “absolutely naked and exposing himself to the public.” The man told police that “he had taken some crack” and “got extremely hot and took off all of his clothes and started running to cool himself off.”

He was placed under arrest and charged with indecent exposure.


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