Garden City police arrested two men Friday night and charged them with vandalizing places of worship and theft. One of the men was charged with a felony count of bestiality in an unrelated incident, police said.
Churches where items were stolen or property damaged from July 20-25 include Jasper Springs Baptist Church and Garden City Primitive Baptist Church on Smith Avenue and Dean Forest Baptist Church on Dean Forest Road.
Among stolen goods were a Ford Ecoline Van, which was recovered, and a Honda Element.
Similar incidents that occurred Friday at Living Hope Community Fellowship on Augusta Road and Silk Hope Baptist Church on Pineland Drive are also being investigated, according to police reports, though no charges had been filed in those cases as of Monday afternoon.
Anthony Scott Bloodworth and Jeremy Daniel Gauthier, both 34, were arrested Friday and booked in the Chatham County jail after police secured warrants while investigating the church break-ins.
Bloodworth, of the 5000 block of Silk Hope Road, was booked on four felony counts of vandalism to a place of worship, four felony counts of burglary in the second degree, three felony counts of theft by taking, misdemeanor possession of marijuana and a drug-related object and failure to comply/pay child support.
Gauthier, of the 100 block of Beasley Road, was booked on four felony counts of vandalism to a place of worship, four felony counts of burglary in the second degree, three felony counts of theft by taking and one felony count of bestiality.
Garden City Police Chief David Lyons said the men were identified after investigators learned one of them had cashed a check stolen from one of the churches.
“We were able to identify them and got enough information to get a search warrant, and in the process of searching where he had been living, found other materials taken from that specific church or one or more of the other churches,” Lyons said.
Lyons said Gauthier was kicked out of the home where he was living when a female housemate allegedly caught him in the act of sodomizing her dog, which is why the bestiality charge was filed.
He then went to stay at a hotel in Garden City before he and Bloodworth were arrested by police Friday night after a traffic stop, Lyons said.
The investigation by Garden City police is ongoing, and Lyons said detectives are trying to determine whether charges will be filed in other area church break-ins.
“We’re still shoring up the case and making sure we’ve got everybody and trying to tie those in to a couple churches in the Savannah area in the same time frame,” Lyons said. “Our guys worked pretty much around the clock from the time of the church burglaries until we made the arrests on Friday evening late.”