By RODNEY HO/rho@ajc.com, filed originally November 4, 2013
I was arriving at the Steve Yeun panel at the Walker Stalker convention Sunday morning in downtown Atlanta, and in front of me was Yeun himself. He was dressed down, with a backpack and a Detroit Tigers cap, looking very much like the pizza delivery boy he had been as Glenn on "The Walking Dead" before the zombie apocalypse roughed him up.
Well, Yeun left that backpack in his vehicle later that day here in Atlanta and someone broke his car window and swiped it. Say goodbye to his laptop and camera. (He likes to take pictures, as he noted on the panel Sunday.)
Here's the note he wrote on Instagram to the perpetrator, who is unlikely to ever read it: (Warning: it's a little salty)
hey. a**hole that broke into my car. I hope you enjoy what you find in my backpack. The computer I'm sure you sell to some other idiot. great. my camera is one of my favorite cameras. it's my ricoh. enjoy the pictures that I took on there of all the beautiful people that I love. but I hope you also enjoy the pictures I took of my stupid messy room. you also took my book too, you d*ck. I was half way through that thing...now I have to start over from the beginning. that's just the rules. but for real what pisses me off most is that you took my notebook full of my dumb ideas that I will never use. I loved those dumb ideas. it was a constant reminder for me to do better. now I gotta write down all those dumb ideas over again. those are the rules. one particular section had some stand up jokes in there. well there goes my 5 minute set that I've been working on about wizards, vertigo, and chocobos. you're a d*ck. but I still love you.
11 Alive got the police report.
According to the report from Atlanta Police, the call came in at 9:00 PM Sunday. Yeun had parked in the 500 block of Edgewood Avenue. He told police he left a Northface backpack with a Mackbook Air, Ricoh Camera, black iPod, and a David and Goliath (halfway finished) hardcover book. Yeun said his Macbook had tracking capabilities, but there was no signal Sunday night.
Lesson learned: don't leave a bag in plain sight in a vehicle at night in downtown Atlanta.
This story gives me an excuse to write a bit about 29-year-old Yeun yesterday from the panel, which drew more than 150 people at 10 a.m. on a Sunday.
Several attractive women and cute girls asked him questions but oddly, two guys asked him for hugs. One little girl, probably seven or eight, tried to trade her Tigers cap for his, but he couldn't part with it, so he promised her another one.
He said ironically while shooting the portion of the series where the characters were getting the flu, virtually the entire cast did in fact get an illness. And since he won't give us any spoilers, all he could say about Glenn is he's very ill, something we already know. Will he die? He won't say.
From an acting standpoint, he said the emotional stuff isn't as tough for him as the technical/stunt stuff. "We get beat up pretty good," he said.
And like many of the other actors, he is well aware that job security is not something to count on (there are only five originals left from season one and you can say four, if Carol is exiled forever.) He's one of those originals but could very well become a zombie this season.
"People want jobs," he said. "And we want to keep our jobs. We love the show but I think what's great is every person who has gone in the past has left an indelible mark and make the story progress that much more. It's a show that has 20 million viewers a week and might go down history as a show people really dug... [Potentially dying as a character] sucks but it's cool."
And random shout out to a TV show: he enjoyed "The Regular Show" on Atlanta-based Cartoon Network.
