SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Neighbors are fed up and frustrated – or, at least, they were – after thieves busted into their cluster mailbox and stole all the mail.
Then, the local post office let it sit broken for four months. It wasn’t until ABC10 reached out to the U.S. Postal Service that something got done.
Cynthia Johnson and Jenny Cheatham have been neighbors for more than 20 years, in the South Sacramento community of Valley Hi.
On Tuesday, they showed ABC10 what had happened to the cluster mailbox that serves each of them, plus about a dozen other neighbors on their street.
“The box is absolutely broken,” Johnson said. “We don’t know what happened or how it happened. However, they haven’t fixed it. When I’m at the post office, I talk to them about it. They don’t have any answers for us.”
“This is ongoing,” Cheatham said, adding that she had mail stolen as part of the break-in.
They said it happened in early November.
“It’s been four months. That’s absolutely unacceptable,” Johnson said. “There’s no reason that it should take this long.”
During these past four months, affected neighbors have had to drive nearly 5 miles round-trip to pick up their mail at their local post office.
“We go to the post office every couple of days to check our mail. It’s an inconvenience,” Cheatham said.
ABC10 made the drive. It was about 9 minutes one-way. Plus, Johnson said, she normally waits at least 30 minutes in line to get her mail.
“That’s a lot of time out of our day. We’re busy families, working women. We shouldn’t have to deal with this,” Johnson said. “If they could do anything about this - the city councilman, the postmaster, whoever is watching this - help us in the Valley Hi area. Get someone to fix our mailboxes. That's the least we deserve here in our community.”
Right after speaking with these homeowners, ABC10 reached out to the U.S. Postal Service. A spokesperson said she’d look into getting answers for us.
That was Tuesday afternoon. Less than 24 hours later - by late Wednesday morning – the local post office had fixed Johnson’s and Cheatham’s cluster mailbox.
“And just like that, they have fixed our mailboxes. Look at that. That's all it took. Thank you, Channel 10 News,” Johnson said in a video she sent to ABC10, showing us the newly fixed mailbox.
A USPS spokesperson thanked ABC10 for bringing this to their attention.
“We apologize for the inconvenience this has caused our customers,” she said. “It was a case of miscommunication. The manager sent the order in for the repair, but somehow it was never received.”
She said the local post office in charge of that cluster mailbox – at 4301 Brookfield Drive - had a change of management during the past four months.
“Unfortunately, a recent changeover in management caused miscommunication with our maintenance department in the box repair,” she further clarified. “We truly apologize once again.”
Neighbors are happy to have their mailbox back, but as Cheatham put it, “after four months and we put it on the news and now they want to do something about it. All they had to do was just fix it.”
“Thank you (ABC10) for using your platform to see us, hear us and help us in our community,” Johnson added.
In terms of broken cluster mailboxes, U.S. postal inspector Matthew Norfleet told ABC10, this neighborhood isn’t alone.
“We've seen probably every possible kind of attack on cluster mailboxes that you can think of, from prying them open to counterfeiting the keys to ripping them off their bases with chains, dragging them away,” he said. “Our engineers at the Postal Service and the Inspection Service are constantly working on ways to improve the security of cluster mailboxes.”
Norfleet is a U.S. postal inspector, which he described as “the federal agents who are associated with the Postal Service.”
If you see a mail theft in progress, he said, call 911, but afterward—call his office.
“877-876-2455. They can also go online – USPIS.gov – for U.S. Postal Inspection Service. We're part of the Postal Service, we work with the Postal Service, but if people get the information to us directly, postal inspectors can act on it faster,” he said. “That information is most useful when it's fresh, when those mail thieves are out there stealing mail. They're not there long, and we want to catch them.”
Mail theft isn’t necessarily on the rise, he said, but thieves do move around, so certain neighborhoods might just be seeing it for the first time.
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