From jail, Georgia man charged in truck-burying caper pens woeful poem about his dead dog

The broken ground was a colossal clue in a caper most poetic.

It was early August when sheriff’s deputies in southern Putnam County in search of a stolen Isuzu box truck — one that belonged to a cabinet-making company in Milledgeville — happened upon the patch of recently disturbed dirt.

The just-shoveled soil and the backhoe parked beside it were, to seasoned lawmen at the scene, a telltale sign of ill-gotten, now-hidden treasure.

They made the discovery after receiving a tip to look around a house off Rabbit Skip Road near Murder Creek and the northwestern reaches of Lake Sinclair. The box truck had been swiped a few days prior.

Upon finding the broken soil behind a workshop, the deputies took to digging. Soon they unearthed the cargo-hauling portion, or “box” of the stolen truck, which had been unceremoniously entombed there in the countryside on Sparrow Way.

The episode was first reported by the Eatonton Messenger newspaper, which quoted Sheriff Howard Sills saying that an object like that “doesn’t just fall in your yard,” and that “it sure as hell doesn’t just get buried.”

Among the quartet of suspects in the case was a man who lived there. He was arrested on a charge of theft by receiving. The man, 61, has been to prison four times in the past four decades for convictions that include trafficking meth and peddling marijuana.

The rest of the truck turned up stashed in some woods in neighboring Jasper County, where hunters found it.

The 61-year-old suspect, soon after he was locked up, sent a note to the Putnam sheriff. In the note, a copy of which was obtained by the Cop Shop, the suspect seemingly sought forgiveness, perhaps hoping the sheriff would go easy on him.

The man wrote that he had been working on “a poem book.” He said he has penned more than 1,000 poems in recent years in the wake of his mother’s death. His writing talent, he noted, comes “from mom and God. … Everybody says I’m good.”

He also mentioned how his dog had died mere days before his arrest. “I have no children,” he wrote, “but she was like one.”

On notebook paper, he included a poem, an homage to the hound, titled “Sweet Georgia May,” which reads, in part:

My heart has forever been broken; As my soul overflows with such pain. For heaven has another sweet angel; Georgia May is that sweet angel’s name. Now for years I was blessed to have had her; For she showered me with such love and charm. … At 6:12 this morning, Georgia May died in my arms.

Dispatches: After a woman bought gas at the High Falls Mini Mart the morning of July 2, she apparently forgot to remove the pump nozzle from her car. She drove off and, in doing so, snatched the rubber hose from the pump. A clerk there told a sheriff’s deputy that “it happens all the time” but that usually the driver returns with the ripped-away nozzle. … An accusation filed in Bibb County Superior Court in mid-August said a Macon man charged with criminal damage to property “did intentionally damage a brown sectional sofa … by slashing the sofa and its cushions with a knife.”