The Blotter: Great Will 

Bury the Hatchet PSA: Do not fuck with Goodwill employees. A thief in the Ballantyne area learned this the hard way last week when an employee stopped him in his tracks despite the fact that he was holding a weapon. According to the report, the suspect shoplifted seven pairs of shoes and a hatchet from a Goodwill store on Lancaster Highway. Despite the fact that the man was now armed with a hatchet, an employee chased him into the parking lot and detained him until police arrived. Give that man a raise.

'Twas All In Vein The fun thing about the Blotter is that, while for the most part the same shit happens on a day-to-day basis that was happening in these pages 30 years ago, there's always going to be something that happens every week that you've just never seen before. Such was the case in Dilworth last week, when a woman was assaulted with something we've never seen used as a weapon. The victim in this case was working as a paramedic at Carolinas Medical Center when the suspect "threw a medical IV at her," hitting her in the right arm. The victim was unharmed, but the suspect will regret ever tossing an IV at anyone, as they've now been charged with assault with a deadly weapon on emergency personnel, which carries no small sentence.

Tantrum Time A 65-year-old woman suffered minor injuries last week after a woman attacked her in a convenience store and then attacked the store itself. Witnesses told police that the suspect got into an argument with the victim at a BP on The Plaza, then assaulted her. After the assault, the woman stayed on the scene for around six minutes before continuing on her rampage, doing $300 in damage to a Red Bull storage display. Before leaving the business, the suspect grabbed a $25 dollar bottle of wine, then left without paying for it.

Do-not A similar incident occurred at a convenience store in west Charlotte on the same morning that the above-mentioned incident took place. A 34-year-old man working at a 7-Eleven on Beatties Ford Road told police that a suspect walked out of the business with $5 worth of donuts without paying for them at around 6 a.m. The employee did not give chase, but he would run into the thieving suspect again when he went to take the trash out, at which the time the suspect, who was standing by the dumpster, threw a can at him and hit him in the arm.

No Good Deed Last week, we reported on a man who was carjacked after pulling over to offer a ride to a man walking down I-485. The trend continues this week as another Good Samaritan was victimized after trying to help someone. The 23-year-old woman in this case told police that she and her boyfriend had stopped to assist a stranded motorist in University City, driving them to the gas station to get gas and then returning them to their car. She soon thereafter found that someone was using her credit card at various locations she had never been to, and that's how she learned that the person she had helped had stolen her credit card while riding in her car.

The Hangover A 28-year-old man from Concord found himself piecing together the night of his bachelor party last week, which is not all that unusual, except for the fact that he didn't even drink enough to get drunk. The man told police he went Strike City at the EpiCentre in Uptown Charlotte for bachelor festivities on a Friday night, but after just one hour and one single drink he blacked out and, according to the report, "the next clear memory he has was the following morning about 2:30 or 3 a.m. at his house with one of his friends." The man went to his doctor the following Monday and was tested for drugs, for which the results were positive, although the report does not state what drugs he was given, exactly. He filed a police report and notified his employer, the Air National Guard, so as not to lose his job for failing an upcoming drug test.

Nostalgia A woman was doing some spring cleaning around her house in east Charlotte last week and found something she'd rather forget. It was sort of like when Facebook's "Memories" feature shows you an old picture of an ex-spouse as if it's something that you'd recall fondly. The 64-year-old woman filed a police report and stated that she was cleaning her house when she found a bullet dug into the outside wall. She said she believed the bullet probably hit her house about two years ago when some people were shooting it out in her neighborhood, but she still wanted the crime documented, as it did $150 in damage to her siding.

Lights Out A car burglar broke into a 33-year-old man's Kia Optima in Uptown Charlotte last week, and perhaps they thought that if they kept the victim in the dark about it, they would never be found out. The victim told police that the thief stole $80 in cash from the car and then removed the dome light from the top of the car's interior.

Trashed A 37-year-old woman turned to police after finding what looked to be the work of some child vandals but turned out to involve children in an entirely different manner. The woman told police that someone had damaged both her mailbox and trash can, and she thought someone had done it purposefully until she talked to a neighbor who said that a Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools bus had hit her property and kept on driving.

All stories are pulled from police reports at CMPD headquarters. Suspects are innocent until proven guilty.