A former U.S. Postal Service mail carrier who stole more than 1,500 pieces of mail from hundreds of customers along her delivery route in Santee was sentenced Friday to five years of probation and ordered to perform 200 hours of community service.
Prosecutors say Tracy Rumley, 44, of El Cajon, was first spotted last November taking mail from a Santee apartment complex. One of the residents, an off-duty San Diego police detective, saw the woman flee in a car and spotted her license plate.
Investigators later searched Rumley’s home and found more than 1,500 pieces of mail, which included gift cards, credit cards and Christmas presents stolen from almost 900 customers, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
Though she’d been fired from the Postal Service a few weeks prior to the police search, she’d kept the keys she used as a mail carrier to access mailboxes and continued stealing mail after her firing, prosecutors said.
She was charged by federal prosecutors in January and pleaded guilty three months later.
