Joseph Heath Wade told Cherokee County sheriff’s deputies that four black men robbed him at gunpoint of about $600 Monday afternoon as he sat in his ice cream truck at a church parking lot.
But four black men weren’t behind bars Friday morning. Wade was.
“While interviewing Wade yesterday afternoon,” Cherokee sheriff’s spokesman Lt. Jay Baker said, “he admitted to detectives he made up the story about the robbery.”
Wade’s story began to unravel when Cherokee detectives contacted his employer, Baker said. They learned Wade had been fired from the company earlier this week after they discovered “a significant amount of ice cream” was missing from his truck.
When investigators confronted Wade Thursday afternoon, he told them he used the “stolen” money to pay another person’s drug debt, Baker said. The location of the fictional incident, Reinhardt College Parkway in Canton, is an area commonly known for cocaine dealing, he said.
Wade was arrested Thursday night and taken to the Cherokee Adult Detention Center, where he was being held in lieu of $12,200 bond on charges of false report of a crime and giving a false statement.
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