Complaints of stolen checks, each placed in a mailbox outside the Park Ridge Post Office, were on the radar of local police and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service more than a year before the Postal Inspection Service’s Sept. 15 arrest of a Dolton man on mail theft charges, reports filed with the Park Ridge Police Department indicate.
But no one—not the Park Ridge Police Department nor the Park Ridge Post Office or U.S. Postal Inspection Service—issued a warning to the public that thefts were occurring, and the mailboxes remained open for use for more than 14 months.
According to a series of reports obtained by Pioneer Press/Chicago Tribune through a Freedom of Information Act request, residents and business owners began approaching Park Ridge police as far back as June 2020 with allegations that checks they mailed from the Park Ridge Post office had been intercepted, altered and cashed by people who were not the intended recipients.
Between June 20, 2020 and Sept. 23, 2021, at least 24 reports of stolen checks, each mailed from the drive-up boxes outside the post office at 333 Busse Highway, were made to Park Ridge police.
The reports do not include mail allegedly stolen on Sept. 15, which led to an arrest.
Word that an investigation into mail thefts was taking place did not surface until mid-September when a television news channel reported that a number of Park Ridge residents had taken to a social media site, claiming checks they had mailed were stolen.
Park Ridge Police Chief Frank Kaminski has defended the police department’s decision to not inform the public that multiple reports of mail theft tied to the Park Ridge Post Office had been made and he maintained that stance this week.
“There’s a point where you don’t want to compromise the investigation and you want to make an arrest,” he said. “If we tip (the suspects) off too soon, they will go to another location and we won’t find them.”
Kaminski noted that the U.S. Postal Inspection Service had jurisdiction over the case, taking the lead on the investigation with assistance from Park Ridge police. Park Ridge did inform the postal inspection service that complaints of stolen mail were being made to the department, he said.
“It’s not our case and how it’s going to be handled and navigated is always going to be dictated by the feds,” Kaminski said.
The decision by Park Ridge Police to keep Park Ridge mail thefts under wraps is in contrast to that of the village of Lombard, which last week issued a warning on its Facebook page, alerting residents that mailboxes outside the Lombard Post Office, 380 E. St. Charles Road, were broken into at least two times over the past two months “resulting in theft of mail and subsequent fraud to citizens’ bank accounts.”
Lombard Deputy Police Chief Joe Grage said the department has received 25 reports of stolen mail since Sept. 11. Police notified the public in an effort to encourage victims to come forward and also report any suspicious behaviors they may see near mailboxes, he said.
“This way we have a good handle on how big of an issue it is,” Grage said.
Kaminski said he could not comment on Lombard’s decision to alert citizens.
“You can’t compare investigations that are ongoing,” he said. “That’s just not fair because every one is different …. I think a lot of people might be doing those notifications now because of what we did in making an arrest.”
Kelvin Dortch Jr., 27, of Dolton was arrested Sept. 15 after U.S. postal inspectors searched a Dolton residence and recovered pieces of mail and a container with a tracking device that had been removed from a mail collection box outside the Park Ridge Post Office earlier that day, a federal complaint filed in U.S District Court in Chicago said.
Park Ridge police assisted in the search and arrest, Kaminski said.
At this time, Dortch has not been charged with any prior mail thefts from the Park Ridge Post Office and the investigation remains open, authorities said. How the mailbox was accessed has not been revealed.
Several days after Dortch’s arrest, the three connected mailboxes, which appeared to have significant rust along the bottom, were taped off and sealed, preventing them from being used.
New boxes have since been installed.
Spencer Block, a U.S. postal inspector, said taking mailboxes out of use is a decision that can only be made by the post office itself, though the postal inspection service can advise post offices of “vulnerabilities.”
He declined to say if the postal inspection service had reported such vulnerabilities to the Park Ridge Post Office during the mail theft investigation.
“It’s not part of our typical process to loop in a post office manager every time someone has their mail stolen because there’s not a lot they can typically do about it unless there’s a single clear identifiable point where it is happening,” Block said.
Messages left with Park Ridge Postmaster Calmidy Winbush-Smith were not returned.
Block also declined to comment on why the postal inspection service did not alert the public of the thefts. He and Kaminski noted that early in the investigation, it was unclear whether the mail was being stolen from the boxes themselves or from the distribution center the mail was sent to.
Park Ridge Mayor Marty Maloney made a similar statement this week when asked to comment on the matter.
“As their investigation progressed, they were able to pinpoint where in the postal operation the thefts were actually occurring,” he wrote in an email. “Prior to that progress, a warning to the public would have not been able to be specific about what was taking place and if the thefts were occurring locally in Park Ridge or even at the sorting facility in Palatine.”
Kaminski said police did not speak with the Park Ridge postmaster about increasing security or making changes to the mailboxes.
“That would be the responsibility of the postal inspector,” he said. “That’s their jurisdiction.”
Garry Abezetian, a Park Ridge resident who had two checks stolen in August 2020, admitted that he isn’t sure whether the community should have been notified that mail thefts were under investigation, but believes more should have been done to prevent them.
“I just think they should have tried to increase their security,” he said of the post office. “We knew it had to be at the post office and not a processing center” because of how quickly the checks were cashed.
Abezetian said he notified Park Ridge police and the inspection service, but never received a follow-up call from the latter. Park Ridge police, he said, initially sent him to Chicago to report the theft because the checks were cashed by banks in that city.
In a criminal complaint filed in federal court against Dortch, Postal Inspector Tyler Magnuson wrote that the U.S. Postal Inspection Service began receiving complaints of mail being stolen from the Park Ridge Post Office in November 2020, though how this information was obtained is not indicated.
In January, postal inspection service investigators installed surveillance cameras at the post office, and in June, July and August they viewed footage of a person stealing a bin filled with mail from drive-thru mailboxes on four different occasions, the complaint said.
The postal inspector sought a judge’s authorization to place a tracking device inside the bin, and this approval was received on Sept. 3, the criminal complaint states. The device was placed in the box the following day.
During the early morning hours of Sept. 15, postal inspectors learned the tracking device had moved and were able to trace it to a home in Dolton where Dortch and open mail were found, according to the complaint. Surveillance video also showed a person removing the bin from the box and running off with it, the complaint said.
The investigation into thefts from the Park Ridge Post Office continues, Block said. Kaminski said his department has not received any additional complaints of stolen mail since September.
The last report made to police, on Sept. 23, referenced a theft that appeared to have occurred around Aug. 1.
The 24 reports made to Park Ridge police involved stolen checks that had been mailed to pay mortgages, utilities, cable bills, business expenses, landscaping fees and charitable gifts, among other purposes, the reports indicate. In some, the amounts were erased and increased, resulting in hundreds or even thousands of dollars in losses. All appeared to have a new name on the “pay to the order of” line.
In one case, a $152 check was changed and cashed for $4,141; in another, a check for $2,801 was changed to $22,801, according to the police reports.
The reports filed with Park Ridge Police may not reflect all the thefts that occurred at the post office, because additional reports may have been directly to the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, Kaminski said.
Block said the inspection service encourages all incidents of mail theft to be reported to the agency in addition to local police. He declined to say how many reports his agency received involving Park Ridge.
“Nobody wants to have their mail and money stolen, so it is important for people to know that if it happens to them, we’re the people to call,” Block said.
Reports of stolen mail should be made by calling the Postal Inspection Service at 877-876-2455, he said.
“The postal service delivers over 150 billion pieces of mail to millions of addresses, and what I hope doesn’t happen from these small strings of mail theft is people losing confidence in the mail,” Block said. “If anything, the arrest of Kelvin Dortch should give people more confidence that when somebody tries to undermine the integrity of the mail or makes postal customers victims, there are postal inspectors investigating those crimes and holding those people responsible.”
Asked if police would consider notifying the public in the future if new reports of stolen mail surface, Kaminski said he would.
“Depending on what the pattern is and what we know at the time,” he said. “Everything is a case by case basis. There’s no set rules on this stuff. We try to do our best to maintain public safety and making the arrest is the ultimate goal. We want to try to do that.”
