Burglars Hit Lebec Post Office

  • Lebec Post Office lobby, where thieves entered to steal mail on Sunday, July 27. Call (877) 876-2455 if you have information. A $10,000 reward is offered for info leading to conviction of the burglars.

    Lebec Post Office lobby, where thieves entered to steal mail on Sunday, July 27. Call (877) 876-2455 if you have information. A $10,000 reward is offered for info leading to conviction of the burglars.

By Patric Hedlund

A reward of $10,000 is to be issued for information leading to the arrest and conviction of those involved in a burglary at the U.S. Post Office in Lebec.

Sheriff’s deputies were notified about 12:14 a.m. Sunday, July 27 that two men were seen running from the building.

A reward of $10,000 is to be issued for information leading to the arrest and conviction of those involved in a burglary at the U.S. Post Office in Lebec. Sheriff’s deputies were notified about 12:14 a.m. Sunday, July 27 that two men were seen running from the building. Candy Burns, postal officer in charge for Lebec, drove up from her home in Santa Clarita Sunday morning to secure the facility. She was shown a hole in the lobby wall where bolts holding a metal plate had been pried loose. The plate covered a hole left when a postal vending machine had been removed. The hole was used by burglars to enter the premises.

“I heard from a deputy that the back door and post office box lobby door were open when they arrived. It was all trashed in here,” Burns said in interviews last week. She said the burglars pulled mail out of postboxes, took a post office DVD player, removed packages and took collectors’ editions of Star Wars stamps.

“I had to call the U. S. Postal Service inspection service and they sent out an inspector from Bakersfield. Then I was here for five hours cleaning up,” Burns said.

The U.S. Post Office in Castaic was also burglarized July 21. L.A. County Sheriff’s Deputy Soultanakis took the report. The thieves put a hole through the wall to enter, a deputy said. He said the Castaic facility may not have had an active alarm at the time. There is a similar report about the Lebec facility.

Chuck Noble of Los Padres Estates returned home from a two-week vacation to Glacier National Park to discover that very little mail was waiting for him. “We will have to start contacting creditors and credit card companies and watch for identity theft,” Noble said, complaining that even “the newspapers were missing.”

Michael Whorf, the public information officer for the Kern County Sheriff’s department, said those whose mail has been stolen should take measures to prevent becoming identity theft victims. He suggested that those affected contact credit card and credit reporting agencies to put safeguards on their accounts to screen requests for new credit cards or utility services.

—Patric Hedlund, Pam Sturdevant

This is part of the August 08, 2008 online edition of The Mountain Enterprise.

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