Spears and arrows

Anyone who read The Voice last week knows that Locos Deli and Pub is coming to downtown Milledgeville. I am very excited that Locos is coming, because I have worked at the Locos in Winder, Ga for the last three years. The food and atmosphere are incredible and will be a great addition to downtown Milledgeville.

I go home on the weekends to bartend and wait tables. I work Friday nights and Saturdays. We might have a fight or two, but nothing major ever really happens. However, this weekend was a little crazier than normal.

I was scheduled to work from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Saturday, Sept. 21 in the bar. We were incredibly slow because of the Georgia/ Northwestern and the Florida/ Tennessee games. Around 2 p.m., one of the waitresses asked me if I smelled gas. I took a deep breath and sure enough, the smell of gas was faint in the air. I didn’t really think too much about it because I had customers to wait on, but the smell slowly started getting stronger. One of the girls stepped onto the patio and discovered that the smell was outside as well. That’s when we started to worry.

My boss called the fire department and went to investigate the smell. When the fire department arrived, we were asked to shut down the kitchen and ask our customers to pay their bills and leave. Much to our surprise, the fire department found large pools of gasoline in a back, unfinished storage room of the building. We evacuated the building and were told to wait in the parking lot.

We were not able to clean off our tables, and the servers were not able to do their checkouts. While we were waiting in the parking lot, a second fire truck and two police vehicles arrived to the scene. Yes, it was now a crime scene. Someone had come in through an unsecured side door and doused the place with gasoline. There was gasoline on the walls, wood was piled up around support beams and doused in gas, and the fumes had spread across the restaurant.

The chief of police showed up and secured the building with caution tape. We were shut down for the rest of the evening while the police investigated and cleaned up the gas. They had only a few possible suspects when I left Locos that day.

The owners spent the night cleaning up the rest of the gasoline and the restaurant reopened on Sunday.

I was in awe that someone would come to Locos and attempt to burn it down. It never really occurred to me the inherent danger of the situation. I guess I should thank the Georgia and Florida football teams for keeping all my customers away that day.

Posted by Colonnade Archives on Sep 27 2002. Filed under Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry