While standing outside a Chevron in Acworth late Thursday, one cop pointed another cop to the cellphone tower across the street. Something odd was happening.
“We witnessed a parachute with a person attached to it ... coming down in the area of a tractor-trailer parking lot,” one of the officers wrote in an arrest report.
As they approached the man who had just fallen from the sky, they saw another parachuter jump from the cellphone tower and land in a nearby parking lot.
When officers asked the first man, Brian Sims, for his driver’s license, he said, “The best feeling in the world followed by the worst feeling in the world.”
Sims, of Savannah, and the second alleged parachuter, Stephen Ahlquist, of Lilburn, were both arrested on trespassing charges. Police say they either squeezed past a fence post or hopped a barbed wire fence to climb the cellphone tower.
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That tower is about 300 feet tall, according to records from the Federal Communications Commission.
Jail logs do not show that either man was taken to a hospital before being booked into jail.
“Did you know we were up there?” Sims asked the officers, according to the report. The cops explained they were across the street.
At that point, officers only had Sims in custody. Ahlquist was in the wind, so the police told Sims to call him to get him to come back so he could be arrested.
The call “was obviously a debate on whether he should meet us or remain hidden in the woodline,” police said. That is, until they told Sims that they had a K-9 with them.
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When asked about his experience with the daredevil activity, Sims said he hadnn’t jumped in Acworth before but had done so in South Georgia.
Police noticed that Sims was wearing a GoPro on his helmet. It was put into evidence.
He asked the cops: “How much trouble am I going to be in?”
Sims was in Cobb County jail for four hours and 20 minutes, records show, before being bonded out for $1,320 early Friday.
Ahlquist was bonded out for the same amount after seven hours in Cobb jail.
Upcoming court dates for Sims and Ahlquist were not listed in the Cobb magistrate court database.
In July, three men were arrested in Minnesota for allegedly parachuting off a cellphone tower several hundred feet high, according to media reports. They also faced federal scrutiny from the Department of Homeland Security because their tower was on a public utility site.
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