A Marietta neighborhood was quite the scene Wednesday morning.
There was a suspected knife-wielding carjacker, a man with a sledgehammer who didn’t want his truck stolen and a woman with two young children whose home became a SWAT standoff location, police said.
By the end, 22-year-old Taavon Johnson was arrested after a Marietta police lieutenant talked him into peacefully leaving the home.
Johnson was known to police, considering there were five warrants for his arrest from incidents — vehicle burglaries and vehicles thefts —within the past month.
In fact, police said he’s successfully run from officers twice in that time.
On Wednesday, police said they received multiple 911 calls from Natchez Trace near Powder Springs Street at 8:33 a.m.
The callers were saying there was a man standing on the back of a moving flatbed utility truck, swinging a sledgehammer at the driver side of the truck.
Credit: Cobb County Sheriff's Office
Credit: Cobb County Sheriff's Office
Two minutes later, the sledgehammer-swinging man was on the phone with a 911 operator saying someone had tried stealing his commercial vehicle.
He told the operator that the driver had crashed the truck at 1320 Natchez Trace before pulling out a knife and running away.
A Cobb County sheriff’s deputy reported seeing Johnson enter a home at Bellemeade Drive and Springhollow Lane at 9 a.m.
Officers and deputies surrounded the house and saw “a woman crying for help outside the residence and two small preschool-aged children inside the residence,” Marietta police said.
Law enforcement officers got the children out, and a Marietta SWAT negotiator talked Johnson, who was holed up in the attic, into coming out.
Marietta police spokesman Chuck McPhilamy said the sledehammer-swinging victim refused medical treatment, and no one else was injured.
“The goal for any of us at the end of the day is for all of us to go home safely, including the suspect,” McPhilamy said.
Johnson is listed by name as the suspect in the four other recent outstanding warrants.
Cops almost arrested him on Sept. 28, but he ran away, leaving behind the items he allegedly stole from a Toyota Scion, according to a warrant. He also dropped his black, cat-shaped wallet.
The most recent incident was Oct. 10 when, according to a warrant, a woman found her Ford Focus ransacked and the front passenger window shattered.
A purse, two aprons, $20 in cash, a work check stub, two prescription glasses and two house keys were taken, the warrant said. Police recorded fingerprints from the car and ran them through a federal database, which yielded a match for Johnson.
This allegedly happened a quarter of a mile from the scene of the standoff.
His fingerprints were also a match to prints found on a stolen Honda Prelude, according to another warrant.
Police said they will continue to investigate Johnson, whose criminal record in Cobb, according to court records, dates back to a marijuana arrest in June 2014.
About the Author
