A 17-year-old Eatonton girl stopped at a red light on the Eatonton Bypass/U.S. Hwy. 441 last week, and it was there that a nightmare began for her.
She noticed a man following her and, at some point, when it was obvious he was not going to stop, she became so scared that she called 911. He was arrested two days later.
Stopped in a southbound lane at the Walmart intersection the evening of Tuesday, Jan. 16, the young woman glanced at the older model pickup stopped in the lane next to her and saw the male driver smiling at her.
“She told us the way he was smiling creeped her out,” Putnam County Sheriff Howard Sills said.
When the light turned green, the teen sped up and turned left on Old Milledgeville Road, then onto Dennis Station, and the pickup driver did, as well.
“Now, according to their addresses, they were both supposed to turn there to get to their respective houses,” Sills clarified.
The pickup driver was following closely behind the woman, and at a sharp curve in the roadway, he reportedly went around her, passed on a double yellow line at a high rate of speed, and sped away. But when she got to the intersection of Dennis Station and Twin Bridges roads, the same pickup truck was parked in the roadway and the driver was standing in the road beside it, smoking a cigarette, Sills said. When she stopped, the man walked toward her car, and she took off around him and continued driving toward her parents’ house. The man reportedly jumped back in his truck and followed her.
At a later intersection, the woman continued the way she was going and the man in the pickup continued following her.
“Now, according to his address, he should’ve turned right to go to his house, but he didn’t,” Sills noted.
When the teen continued turning on roads near her residence, the man continued following closely behind her. She became frightened and called 911 and her parents.
“She held up her cell phone and waved it around so he could see it through the rear window of her vehicle, showing him that she was calling for help, and when she did that, he turned off and stopped following her,” Sills said.
Deputies reportedly stayed on the phone with the parents and with their daughter throughout the ordeal until she was home safe. Deputies met with the young woman and her parents and searched the roads looking for the vehicle. After they filed a report with the sheriff’s office, her parents also posted the incident on social media with a description of the pickup, warning people to watch out for it and the driver and requesting anyone who saw it to call the sheriff’s office.
“An anonymous person called Thursday and said the truck that fit the description given on the social media world that we were looking for was parked in front of a house on Little River Trail,” Sills said.
The pickup was a black 1995 Chevrolet S10 truck with an off-white camper top on the back of it, according to the sheriff, which made it easy to identify.
Sills said Sgt. Jeffrey Duncan “did a good job going door-to-door on Little River Trail and found the truck.”
The driver, later identified as Dennis James Talley, reportedly told Duncan that he remembered the girl, but he wasn’t following her. After more questioning and answers that didn’t make any sense, Sills said, warrants were obtained.
Sills said Talley was “fresh out of prison” and on parole for trafficking methamphetamine in Whitfield County, which means he and his property are subject to searches at any time without a warrant.
When Sills and a parole officer went to Talley’s house, they saw a safe bolted to the floor. Talley told them he didn’t know the combination because the safe wasn’t his.
“So, we got some tools to open it, and when he saw that we were getting it open, he gave us the combination and there was meth in there,” Sills said.
“The parole officer asked him, ‘You had 158 other counties you could’ve gone to, why Putnam?’” Sills continued. “He said a friend invited him to come here and stay.”
Dennis James Talley, 54, of Little River Trail, Eatonton, was arrested on Jan. 22 and is being held in Putnam County jail without bond facing charges of parole violation, possession of methamphetamine, and misdemeanor stalking.