A Macon Walmart was trashed by an estimated 40 to 50 teenagers around 1:45 a.m. Sunday in an incident caught on video.
The teens raided the aisles of the Georgia store “destroying merchandise displays and items,” said a Bibb County sheriff’s report
issued after the incident, The Telegraph reported. The report also says the vandals caused $2,000 worth of damage.
The incident, caught on store’s security cameras, shows the teens walking into the Walmart in groups of twos and threes. One teenager walked ahead of the crowd and raised a gang sign, prompting the crowd to ransack the store. He was later identified as 17-year-old Kharron Nathan Green.
The crowd pulled a shopper out of his motorized shopping cart and threw him to the ground. Once the police pulled up to the store, the vandals began to flee.
“This was a planned event . . . to see how much damage they could cause,” Green reportedly told a Walmart employee as he fled, The Telegraph reported. Authorities arrested the teen when he returned to the scene to get his cell phone that he had left behind.
Green at first claimed “he did not know anything about what had happened in the store and that he did not know anyone involved,” according to The Telegraph. However, once the sheriff’s deputies showed his parents the surveillance footage, Green admitted to having been the one holding up the gang sign. He has been charged with inciting a riot and second-degree property damage.
In the aftermath, “the length of the store from front to rear was lined with items which had been shattered, destroyed, turned over, and thrown about,” the report said, according to The Telegraph.
The incident came as a surprise to local law enforcement.
"This is the first I've ever even heard of anything like this occurring in Macon in all my years of law enforcement,” Randy Gonzalez, Bibb County
Public Information Officer Lieutenant, told 13 WMAZ.
“Hopefully it’s not a pattern of behavior,” Sheriff David Davis told The Telegraph. He questioned the youths’ parental supervision “due to the lateness of the hour.”
“I don’t know that they were going to be going to church the next morning,” Davis continued.