Lynchburg man’s appetite leads to burglary conviction

By Chris Dumond

Published: November 14, 2008

The way to a man’s heart may be through his stomach, but one Lynchburg man’s stomach took him on a detour to prison.

According to Assistant Commonwealth’s Attorney Bethany Harrison, 33-year-old Bernard Wood didn’t just like stealing other people’s belongings. He liked raiding their refrigerators, too.

It appears that stealing appliances, jewelry and tools can work up a man’s appetite.

Wood was tied to a June string of burglaries in a Rivermont Avenue neighborhood after he washed down some stolen chicken with a bottle of orange juice at a home he’d broken into on the 1100 block of Pansy Street.

“He ate the chicken like it was a cob of corn,” Harrison said at a court hearing on Friday. “And then he just left it there.”

Wood was free on bond on two February breaking-and-entering charges in the same neighborhood at the time of the June 14 and 15 burglaries, the prosecutor said. It didn’t take much detective work to match his greasy fingerprints on the orange juice bottle to those on file.

Wood also stole 78 bags of Boy Scout popcorn from a home on Charlotte Street that weekend. When Lynchburg police went to arrest him at an Early Street home, they caught him with bags full of the popcorn, Harrison said.

Lynchburg Circuit Court Judge Mosby Perrow found Wood guilty Friday morning of three counts of burglary and two counts of grand larceny. He was sentenced to six years in prison.