Across Georgia

KINGSLAND --- A traveling beef jerky salesman and former banker has been charged in a Tuesday afternoon bank robbery in Kingsland, police said.

Police arrested Tony Bell, 46, of St. Augustine, Fla., minutes after the robbery at the Ameris bank on Georgia Highway 40, about two miles east of Interstate 95.

Mr. Bell was stopped by Kingsland police and Camden County sheriff's deputies as he attempted to get onto southbound I-95 about two minutes after the bank alarm was activated by employees. Officers made the traffic stop based on a description of the robber and getaway vehicle by bank employees, said Lt. Todd Tetterton, a spokesman for the Kingsland Police Department.

School's president left suicide note

ATLANTA --- According to the Fulton County Medical Examiner's office, the president of Woodward Academy wrote a suicide note before apparently jumping to his death.

Investigator Tami Schroder told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Wednesday that the note was left in Harry Payne's eighth-floor hotel room in midtown Atlanta. Ms. Schroder would not say what was written in the note.

Mr. Payne's death Monday came just hours after he gave a rousing speech at a faculty and staff luncheon to kick off 2008 at the College Park school.

Woman who ran over bicyclist still sought

SAVANNAH --- Savannah-Chatham Police are searching for the driver of a car that ran over and seriously injured a bicyclist Thursday morning, the Savannah Morning News reported.

The crash occurred shortly after 10 a.m. at the intersection of Wayne and Lincoln streets. The driver is a white woman in her 20s.

She was last seen speeding away from the scene in a white passenger car.

New county jail will cost pretty penny

ATHENS --- The Clarke County Jail is less crowded than it was four months ago, but Athens still needs a new jail and the price tag is rising, officials have told The Athens Banner-Herald .

The number of inmates in the custody of the Clarke County Sheriff's Office dropped from an all-time high of 567 on Sept. 15 to 395 on Tuesday, according to data compiled by the sheriff's department.

Because inmates who can't be housed in the 360-capacity Clarke County Jail are kept in other county jails at a cost of about $45 a day, the drop in the number of inmates is saving taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars, The Banner-Herald reported this week.

An even larger expense -- a new jail that's now estimated to cost $72 million -- remains on the horizon, though.

-- Edited from wire reports