About The times. (Gainesville, Ga.) 1972-current | View Entire Issue (April 15, 2020)
LOCA^NATION The Times, Gainesville, Georgia | gainesvilletimes.com Midweek Edition - April 15-16, 2020 7A Gainesville man accused of smash-and grab burglaries BY NICK WATSON nwatson@gainesvilletimes.com A Gainesville man is accused in a pair of smash-and grab burglar ies over the weekend at local gas stations, police said. Gainesville police officers first responded to a burglary report around 7:30 a.m. Sunday, April 12, to the Old Athens Highway Citgo, but police believe the bur glary happened around 11:30 p.m. Saturday. “Officers on scene gained access to surveillance footage depicting the suspect, identified as Anthony Thirkield, breaking the glass on the front door and prying the security bars apart,” Gainesville Police Chief Jay Parrish said in a news release. “Thirkield attempted to squeeze him self in between the secu rity bars, but was unable to make full entry into the business.” After circling the business, police said, Thirkield left the gas station. Police found the front door of 129 Package Store/Valero on Old Athens Highway broken while patrolling the area. After contacting the owner and checking sur veillance footage, officers determined a suspect entered the gas station multiple times between 11 p.m. Saturday and 4:30 a.m. Sunday. “In speaking with Valero management, it was determined the suspect stole an undisclosed amount of cash, cigarettes, lighters and lottery tickets. Based on Valero surveil lance footage, it was confirmed the suspect matched the descrip tion of the suspect from Citgo,” according to Gainesville Police. Officers circulated a photo of Thirkield among themselves, and Thirkield was found around 8:30 a.m. Sunday in the area of Athens Street and Athens Highway. Items stolen from the Valero and a synthetic cannabinoid were found in Thirkield’s possession, police said. Thirkield, 32, was charged with two counts of smash-and-grab burglary, second-degree criminal damage to property, possession of a synthetic cannabinoid and bringing contraband across the guard line. He was booked into the Hall County Jail, where he remains. “Mr. Thirkield maintains his innocence regarding these alleged burglaries. We do not believe the person in the burglary is Mr. Thirkield,” defense attorney Brett Willis wrote in an email. “It’s unclear what ‘items’ the police are claiming they recovered from Mr. Thirlkield that allegedly ties him to these burglaries. And, we look forward to an opportunity to clear his name, whenever that eventu ality may occur owing to current circumstances.” T-T \ I Thirkield Feds say coronavirus economic relief checks won’t have to be repaid BY AMANDA SEITZ Associated Press CHICAGO — Videos and online reports claiming that millions of Ameri cans will have to repay the relief checks they receive from the federal govern ment under the $2.2 trillion coronavirus economic recovery bill are not true. The government began issuing the one-time payments this week. Most adults who earned up to $75,000 will see a $1,200 payout, while married couples who made up to $150,000 can expect to get $2,400. Parents will get payments of $500 per child. The checks will be directly deposited into bank accounts or mailed to households, depending on how you’ve filed your tax returns in the past. In recent days, social media posts have falsely claimed there’s one catch to this money -- that you’ll eventually have to pay it back. “Next year, you’re automatically going to owe $1,200 come tax season,” one of the videos, viewed hundreds of thousands of times on YouTube, falsely claims. The video has also been shared widely on social media platforms including Facebook, Instagram, Twit ter and TikTok. The U.S. Treasury Department and Internal Revenue Service, which are working to deliver the money to people, confirmed to The Associated Press that households will not have to pay back the money in next year’s tax filing. “This is not an advance and there is absolutely no obligation to pay it back, ” Treasury spokeswoman Patricia McLaughlin said in an email. The federal government uses infor mation from 2018 or 2019 tax returns -- whichever was filed most recently - to determine eligibility for the payouts. Those payments begin to get smaller for adults making more than $75,000 and phase out entirely for those earn ing more than $99,000. For married couples, the payments get smaller for those earning more than $150,000, fall ing to zero at $198,000. For heads of household with one child, the benefit starts to decline at $112,500 and falls to zero at $136,500. The confusion on social media appears to have stemmed from lan guage in the economic rescue bill that refers to the checks as an “advance refund” because the money is being given out in the 2020 tax year, before Americans have even filed their tax returns for the year. The 2020 tax form has not been printed but the relief checks will not have any bearing on your income deductions next year, said Eric Smith, a spokesman for the IRS. Photo courtesy Gainesville Police Gainesville Police released a photo from surveillance of a man in a trenchcoat wearing gloves and a face mask, who is supected of robbing a Waffle House employee at gunpoint April 8. SPONSORED BY Police release surveillance of Waffle House armed robbery Gainesville Police released a photo of the April 8 armed robbery suspect at the Pentee Drive Waffle House in Gainesville. The suspect, a man in a trenchcoat wearing gloves and a face mask, robbed a Waffle House employee at gunpoint Wednesday, April 8, police said. The incident happened around 5:15-5:30 a.m. April 8 at the Pentee Drive restaurant, which is near the intersection of Monroe Drive and U.S. 129/Athens Highway. Some Waffle House restaurants are open for carryout service. Cpl. Jessica Van said the suspect left the store with an undisclosed amount of money, and no one was injured. Van did not disclose any further details. Anyone with information is asked to call dispatch at 770- 534-5251 or email investigator Brad Raper at braper@gaines- ville.org. Nick Watson COVTD-19 deaths hit 45 at Virginia nursing home called ‘virus’s dream’ BY SARAH RANKIN AND BERNARD CONDON Associated Press RICHMOND - Ronald Mitchell worried about his mother’s care at a suburban Richmond nursing home long before she was swept up in one of the nation’s deadli est coronavirus outbreaks. She’s bedbound and sus ceptible to seizures. A sore on her foot went unnoticed for so long, he said, that it led to the amputation of her leg. When he called her last month after she tested positive for COVID-19, she sounded disoriented, and he stayed on the line as she pressed a call button and waited an hour and a half for a nurse who never came. Mitchell then called Can terbury Rehabilitation & Healthcare Center directly and was told that they were doing the best they could with just two nurses looking after 40 patients at a time in the coronavirus quarantine wing. With the death toll from the Canterbury outbreak rising to 45, Mitchell can only hope that his 62-year- old mother now on a venti lator in a hospital won’t be next. “It’s the worst feeling in the world,” he said. Canterbury, which has surpassed the death toll of 43 in the outbreak at the Life Care Center in subur ban Seattle, is the kind of facility that’s particularly vulnerable to a coronavi rus wildfire that has raged through the nation’s frail, elderly long-term care populations, claiming more than 4,300 lives. Nearly all of Canter bury’s residents rely on Medicaid funding for care of health problems that in many cases were the prod uct of a lifetime of poverty. It lacks the amenities and space to keep people apart. And it lacks the pay to hire and keep enough staff. “A publicly funded nursing home is a virus’s dream,” said Dr. Jim Wright, Canterbury’s medi cal director. “It is the best place for a virus to be. People are close together. Their immune systems are compromised. It is just a tin der box for that match.” Studies have shown nursing homes heavily dependent on Medicaid for revenue have fewer nurses and other staff per patient than average and lower quality of care over all. And some of the biggest outbreaks so far have been at homes tied closely to the government payment program, including ones in Wayne, West Virginia, and the Crown Heights section of New York City’s Brook lyn borough. Canterbury, which had about 160 residents before its outbreak, was thrown into turmoil from the first COVID-19 diagnosis on March 18. Many of the staff who work at multiple facili ties — Wright couldn’t say exactly how many — quit because they otherwise wouldn’t have been able to continue at their other jobs. Other workers began to get sick themselves. Around the same time, the second doctor who typically saw patients just stopped showing up, which Wright said had a severe impact on the ability to monitor patients. His wife, a palliative care physi cian, started volunteering. Everyone at Canterbury had no choice but to take on unfamiliar tasks. “I was changing patients, cleaning beds. My adminis trator was delivering meal trays,” Wright said. “You pick any element, or any arena in our facility that needed to be up and running at its best and noth ing was,” he said. Exactly how the coro navirus got into Canter bury was not clear, though health officials suspect either an infected worker or someone else who came in before visitations and get-togethers were halted in mid-March. COVID-19 tests were available but scarce at the beginning of the outbreak, but Canterbury was not ini tially able to test all of its residents and staff because of guidance from state and national officials at the time. Virginia’s rules said even long-term care resi dents had to first be tested to rule out the flu and other respiratory pathogens, something Wright and other medical directors asked the health department to change because of the delay it created. By the time tests were finally conducted on everyone at Canterbury about two weeks after the first confirmed case, more than half the resi dents infected with coro navirus — 53 out of 92 — showed no symptoms of the disease. 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