Summary: Instead of delivering the mail, one California postal carrier kept almost 50,000 pieces of mail in her apartment.
Have you ever wondered were all your missing mail goes? I’m sure you never thought a postal worker was stashing it in their home but that may be the case. One U.S. Postal Service employee had roughly 50,000 pieces of mail in her California home that had not been delivered to their proper addresses.
Read U.S. Postal Service Cutting Out Mail Delivery on Saturdays.
Federal investigators have filed criminal charges against Sherry Watanabe for hiding in her home “approximately 48,288 pieces of United States mail.” The mail was supposed to be delivered to customers along her route in Placentia, CA in Orange County.
One felony count has been charged against Watanabe on Wednesday in the U.S. District Court in Los Angeles. A plea agreement included Watanabe confessing to hoarding the mail. She was hired in 2006 by the Postal Service. In 2011, she began collecting large amounts of mail in her Placentia apartment. By late-2013, the undelivered mail had been seized by law enforcement agents. It is unclear why it took two more years for Watanabe to be charged.
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Watanabe could face the maximum three years behind bars but prosecutors have agreed for her to be given a lesser sentence that does not exceed “the low end of the applicable Sentencing Guidelines range.”
In other cases where postal workers kept undelivered mail, the claim was because they had an overwhelming amount of mail to deliver so they opted on hiding the mail instead.
Do you think there should be a harsher punishment for stealing mail? Tell us in the comments below.
To learn more about what another person has done with other peoples’ items, read NYC Sanitation Worker Collects Garbage.
Photo: iptify.com