Deflated tires, food stamps, a knife and a shotgun — how else do you spend Thanksgiving?
Family drama has been known to be at an all-time high during the holiday season, but one Beaufort County family’s Thanksgiving dinner apparently almost reached Hatfield and McCoy status.
On Dec. 1, an Okatie woman reported that the air had been let out of all four tires on her car while it was parked in the lot of her Bluffton workplace, according to a report filed with the Beaufort County Sheriff’s Office.
The woman told deputies she believed the culprit to be her daughter’s boyfriend because there had been an altercation between him and her family on Thanksgiving night.
She said the family had been hanging out around a fire pit outside when the boyfriend began to brag about making a lot of money while also receiving food stamps.
The conversation developed into an argument. The boyfriend threatened the woman’s son with a knife, so the woman’s husband retrieved a shotgun and told the boyfriend to leave, the woman told deputies.
She said her husband never pointed the shotgun at her daughter’s boyfriend. However, her daughter disputes this account, according to an additional report.
When deputies questioned the daughter about the vandalism to her mother’s car, she told them that her brother threatened to kill her boyfriend and that her father “pulled a firearm and pointed it directly at her boyfriend in front of their children,” according the report.
She wanted this documented along with her mother’s vandalism report.
A tree-trimmer in the area of where the mother’s car was vandalized told deputies he saw a man wearing a gray hoodie with a beard and blue eyes tampering with the tires, the report states. He said he confronted the man, who then left in a gray Mercury Mountaineer with a woman inside the car.
The incident remains under investigation. No charges have been filed.
This story was originally published December 6, 2016 at 4:49 PM with the headline "Deflated tires, food stamps, a knife and a shotgun — how else do you spend Thanksgiving?."