After missing mail time on Saturday, one Lubbock resident is out almost $5,000 after the checks he was sending were stolen from his mailbox.
Terry Colley, a resident of South Lubbock, said the checks were stolen some time on Sunday.
“Sunday morning, went to get the paper and I noticed the flag was up on the mailbox. So I thought well I don’t know what that’s all about. Looked in it and we had four checks in there,” he said, of the mail that he and his wife had left to be picked up.
“I started to take them and I thought no it’s in the mailbox it’ll be fine. They’ll pick it up Monday morning,” he explained. “I walked out (later) and I noticed the flag still up, but the mailbox door was down. So I looked in it, and no checks.”
He said three of them were related to his business as a home builder, and the fourth was regarding a personal matter.
Thursday, he received word from his bank that someone had tried to cash one of the checks, which was written for almost $2,000.
“They I guess evidently went ahead and cashed it,” he said. “When it hit my bank they wouldn’t honor it.”
“At least they do have a name on the check. The name that I had on the check and the name that’s on it now is not the same,” he explained.
Colley acknowledged he could have pulled the checks from the mailbox and waited until Monday when it would be picked up again, which has become part of his plan moving forward.
“Mail going out, we’re going to drop it off at a mailbox or bring it to the post office,” he said. “I will not mail any checks through this mailbox here anymore.”
“It concerns me because I built a lot of homes in this neighborhood and I have got a lot of friends here. So it does concern me, but I think the thing that probably concerns me the most is that we kind of worked for that money. It means a lot to us, it means a lot to the people that we’re writing the checks to,” he added.
“Just got to be a little more careful about what you do and it’s sad that that’s the way it is,” he said.
According to the police report, no suspects were identified and the theft was to be reported “to the United States Postal Inspector’s Office for further investigation.”
“It’s a federal offense to go into the mailbox and surely no one is going to steal mail out of my mailbox,” he thought. “Well, that was pretty stupid of me.”
He said he planned to file charges. Under U.S. Code Section 1708, mail theft is a felony offense, with maximum penalties of five years in prison and fines up to $250,000.
