Mt. Greenwood Woman Finds 19 Postal Service Packages In Trash

CHICAGO — A U.S. Postal Service mail carrier delivered a pile of packages to a Mt. Greenwood woman's trash can Tuesday.

While taking out the garbage around 3 p.m., Suzanne Walsh discovered 19 shipping envelopes from retailers that should have been delivered to folks in neighboring Evergreen Park tossed in her trash bin near 105th and Trumbull.

"I'm a 27-year FedEx retiree. My first reaction was, 'Oh, come on. They can't throw away mail," Walsh said.

Garbage day was Monday, so whoever discarded the packages did it in the last 24 hours, Walsh said. News travels fast in Mt. Greenwood Facebook circles, where Walsh posted a photo of the found packages on her kitchen table. About an hour after she found the packages, Walsh got a call from Ald. Matt O'Shea, who says his office gets complaints about mail delivery in the 19th Ward almost every day.

"This is just another example of what an utter disaster the mail service is [in Mt. Greenwood]," O'Shea said.

MORE ON PATCH: No Mail For Weeks: Is Postal Service 'Falling Apart' In Chicago?

Last year, O'Shea (19th) had 150 people show up to a town hall meeting regarding mail delivery trouble in Mt. Greenwood's 60655 ZIP code.

All summer long, on any given block in neighborhoods across the city, Chicagoans complained that their mail went undelivered for days and weeks at a time. In July, mail delivery got so bad that locals reported the Mt. Greenwood Post Office closed for lunch — and snapped photos of a sign tapped to the door as proof.

Mayor Lori Lightfoot and U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin joined O'Shea's call for Postal Service intervention and applied pressure on the Trump Administration to restore reliable mail service in Chicago and around the country. A memo from Postmaster General Louis DeJoy outlining mail service changes leaked to the Associate Press sparked national outrage resulting in a roll back of cuts to overtime associated with delivery problems.

But the changes didn't fix the nagging mail delivery problem in O'Shea's ward.

"We still get phone calls and emails every day from residents who say they're still waiting on mail, still waiting on medication. And here we have a woman who found a bunch of packages in her garbage can," O'Shea told Patch.

"We have weekly meetings [with the Postal Service] They say they're bringing in resources. They say they're correcting the problems, we're in peak season. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Excuses, we get a lot of that. Postal Service leadership still has no idea what they're doing. They've completely failed in correcting the problem and more needs to be done."

A Postal Service spokesman contacted by Patch said news of the packages Walsh found her garbage has been forwarded to the Postal Inspection Service. The spokesman did not respond to questions about lingering mail delivery woes that O'Shea says plagues the Mt. Greenwood post office.

Walsh planned to reach out to folks in Evergreen Park who were expecting deliveries mailed from retailers including Carhartt, Hollister, Dick's Sporting Goods and the University of Notre Dame's official online store that ended up in her trash.

"Alderman O'Shea said he already contacted the post office, so I'm going to hold off to see what they say," she said. "But I want to try to get the packages to people who expect them. This shouldn't happen."