Who is stealing the mail in Davis?
That’s what local residents want to know after reports surfaced earlier this week that someone may have obtained a copy of the master key that opens Davis’ “cluster” mailboxes — the centralized mailbox units typically located in newer neighborhoods — and helped themselves to mail and packages.
“What happens now?” said Willowcreek resident Phil Pacca, who learned about the apparent key theft from his mailman earlier this week and posted the information on Nextdoor, eliciting dozens of shocked and angry responses from his neighbors who realized they’d been victimized. “People are expecting stimulus checks, bills. All that stuff is probably gone.”
The alleged thefts, a federal crime, have been reported to the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, the law-enforcement arm of the U.S. Postal Service, and are being investigated by its Sacramento bureau in cooperation with local authorities and the Davis post office.
“This is something we take very seriously,” said Jeff Fitch, spokesman for the Postal Inspection Service’s San Francisco division. In addition to the thefts, “if we determine somebody has manufactured or used a counterfeit key, that’s a separate federal offense.”
Anyone with information that could aid the investigation is urged to call the Postal Inspection Service’s 24-hour dispatch line at 877-876-2455.
Many learned about the situation after Pacca wrote his Nextdoor post. He told The Enterprise on Wednesday he was working in his home office when he heard a commotion of raised voices outside. “This is unacceptable!” he said a woman declared.
Curious, he went outside to find a couple of neighbors speaking with their mailman, who told Pacca it was his first day back from vacation. Pacca said the mailman was told by his substitute that he had been on his mail route a couple of days earlier and discovered the rear doors of some cluster boxes “wide open.”
“What was odd was that I’d been checking my mailbox and there had been nothing in it for several days,” said Pacca, who had been expecting tax paperwork that was mailed to him in mid-April but never arrived. Even his usual junk mail was missing.
The mailman said a copied master key was suspected, and that it “will work at any box in Davis,” according to Pacca, who noted that the mailman continued to load mail into the box as he spoke. “He was remarkably aloof about the whole thing.”
Fitch, the Postal Inspection Service spokesman, would not confirm whether a master key would open all of the city’s cluster mailboxes, as “we don’t want to educate the bad guys.” For the same reason, he declined to detail any security upgrades being considered for the compromised boxes, though he did say a security assessment is underway.
He also urged the community to take a see-something, say-something approach to the federal probe by continuing to file theft reports and any resulting crimes, such as unauthorized purchases that appear on their credit-card bills. Reports can be filed online at www.uspis.gov/report/.
“It’s reporting that makes all the difference in these investigations,” Fitch said, enabling investigators to trace suspects through store security cameras or online activity. Mail thieves face punishment of up to five years in federal prison and $250,000 in fines, while counterfeit key use can bring up to a 10-year prison term, he added.
Meanwhile, Davis residents like Pacca say they hope this incident leads to more transparency by the Postal Service, which to their knowledge failed to alert the community to the thefts.
“They should have said something, and they did not,” Pacca said.
— Reach Lauren Keene at lkeene@davisenterprise.net or 530-747-8048. Follow her on Twitter at @laurenkeene