LEE’S SUMMIT, Mo. — Local and federal police descended on a Lee’s Summit home Monday where a renter said bins of undelivered mail were stashed.
What makes that accusation even more interesting is that the home is owned by a post office supervisor.
There are bills and bank statements to a John Lynch, Elizabeth Cottingham, Ron Parks and Patricia Thomas. That’s just a sample of the mail found in a home owned by Marcy Galapo, a postal employee who once worked at the Independence Post Office before moving to the Blue Springs Post Office last month.
Loren Martin said he began finding the mail after he moved into the home last summer and started cleaning it up in exchange for rent.
“The smell was horrendous,” said Martin. “I couldn’t even move in the first month.”
The more he cleaned, the more he found and the more concerned he became. But he didn’t speak out until this month when he was threatened with eviction.
“I wanted to get the word out that not everybody is getting their mail,” Martin said.
Among the mail, Martin said, he found a Social Security card belonging to a Latoyia Ford, a driver’s license for a Patsy Pidgeon, a birth certificate for Richard Diamond and a military identification card for Brittney Rhae King.
FOX 4 Problem Solvers was unable to find many of these people, but we did locate Shirley Wall who is still waiting on several pieces of undelivered mail. When FOX 4’s Linda Wagar told her it was found in the home of a post office employee, she was upset.
“If it was a mail carrier that would bother me because they are not doing their job,” said Wall, who never realized she was missing any mail.
It appears that the post office may have realized something was wrong. In one of the bins was a letter from the Postal Inspector asking the Independence Post Office to investigate complaints that mail wasn’t being delivered.
FOX 4 Problem Solvers decided it was time to pay a visit to Marcy Galapo, the postal employee who owns the home, and according to Jackson County records, nine other homes as well.
When asked about the undelivered mail in her home, Galapo denied there was any mail there, and said she was the victim of vicious rumors by an estranged son.
When FOX 4’s Linda Wagar told her she’d actually seen the mail, Galapo insisted she’d been framed.
After talking to us, she drove directly to the Lee’s Summit house where the mail was stashed. Once there, the tenant Loren Martin said he was confronted by Galapo and her boyfriend, another postal employee. Martin said the door to his bedroom was kicked in as the two demanded to talk to him.
“Now the door is busted up,” Martin said.
Martin called police, who notified the US Postal Inspector General’s Office. Federal agents confiscated the mail and took Galapo in for questioning, wondering why someone responsible for getting the mail delivered would have so much undelivered mail in her home.
