Stolen mail left bills and letters across my Raleigh neighborhood. What can be done?
Last Sunday, the citizens of Hungry Neck discovered an alarming sight on the neighborhood’s streets east of downtown: hundreds of letters strewn across the pavement, many of them floating in rain puddles.
On my little street off New Bern Avenue, I found roughly 50 of them tossed in the bushes.
Here’s what I found when I scooped up the wet mess of envelopes:
Somebody’s cable bill payment, torn open; a Netflix DVD somebody was returning; and most heartbreaking of all, a pile of wedding invitations bound for friends and family around the country — obviously an expensive printing complete with pictures of the happy couple.
At first I thought our carrier had accidentally dropped a stack, or maybe they’d blown out of the back of a mail truck. But when I drove around the corner, I found hundreds more envelopes scattered on nearby streets.
No accident here. Somebody stole our mail. Some of it is still sitting on the asphalt.
This crime, as the saying goes, really chapped my behind.
A problem nationally
Mail — the junk variety excepted — is intimate, even precious. There’s a reason people carry it through snow, rain, heat and gloom of night. I’m not the world’s biggest Samaritan, but I leave my carrier a gift card every Christmas, and when it’s hot, I’ve been known to offer lemonade.
Stealing it violated not just one victim’s important and highly personal business, but a whole bagful.
And it’s a problem nationally. Within the past week, reports of stolen mail have turned up in New Orleans and Virginia Beach — where residents are advised against using the blue outdoor boxes.
Here’s what I found out about Raleigh’s mail caper:
My neighbor Chris Crew witnessed this attack on private correspondence while working in the yard Sunday.
He was toting rocks around, and he spotted a car full of several people arguing, one of whom tossed a small package out the window.
He called out and asked them to stop littering, but they rolled up the car’s tinted windows. Soon after, one of the windows opened again and out came what looked like a waterfall of trash.
Crew shot a picture of the car’s license plate and reported this to Raleigh police, who collected the pile of what proved to be stamped and addressed letters.
“Turns out it was stolen mail from three or four states,” he said, “including a big pile of wedding invitations. Another load got dumped a block away.”
I can’t confirm what happened next because Raleigh police haven’t answered messages I left Monday or Tuesday.
Neighbors told me police reported catching the thieves, who had struck several mailboxes around downtown. They also said they were advised against contacting any of the victims.
Normally, this would all get turned over to postal inspectors. But I can’t confirm that because they haven’t returned messages, either — neither locally or in Washington, DC.
‘That’s pretty low’
With no official response, I did what felt right.
I poked around a little and found the wedding couple, a pile of whose invitations were still drying off on my front porch.
I called the groom-to-be, left a message and got a call back within minutes, during which he confirmed that the invitations had cost he and his fiance considerable time and expense. They had just dropped off a box full of invitations at the outdoor mailbox at the New Bern Avenue post office, so all of them are now gone.
“There’s a lot of ways to make a quick buck,” said the groom, who asked to be identified only as Matthew. “But that’s pretty low.”
I met the bride later and delivered the muddy letters I’d found, many of them still damp. She told me she felt violated.
I don’t know what will happen to the mail thieves or how their punishment will be meted out. But I have a sentence in mind:
Have them walk a carrier’s route every day for the next week, when the temperature is expected to flirt with 100 degrees, and apologize at every door.
