SALT LAKE CITY – Imagine you stop receiving your mail out of nowhere and you can’t get an explanation of why from the US Postal Service.
When it happened to a woman from Salt Lake City, she called the KSL Investigators to find out why the post office refused to deliver.
“What I’ve done is file complaints on their website,” Ardis Parshall told KSL. While we spoke with Parshall, a delivery driver stopped to deliver some groceries.
“We haven’t had any mail near us for six weeks now,” said Parshall.
Instead, USPS will hold the mail for her and some of her neighbors at the post office where they can pick it up. However, Parshall doesn’t drive and walks with a stick, so the mile-long walk through the hilly terrain of Salt Lake City’s Avenues to her post office is tough.
Plus, she’s diabetic – putting her in the high-risk category for COVID-19. Her doctors don’t want her on a public bus. Some of the mail that she can no longer get contains diabetes articles.
Parshall said she’s gotten nowhere with her complaints.
“You get an automatic response that it has been received and the next thing I hear is that my case has been resolved and there is a customer satisfaction survey here,” she said.
After a SLC woman it says @USPS no longer delivered mail in her area, and the postal service no longer responded, she called @KSLInvestigates. What we found tonight @ KSL5TV News at 6 pm. pic.twitter.com/SGOsKPOKLK
– Matt Gephardt KSL (@KslMatt) December 22, 2020
The KSL detectives watched the neighborhood as mailmen made their way through the streets around Parshall’s house, but never made her way. What is going on?
No one from USPS would talk about the situation in front of the camera, but in a statement, a spokesperson blamed a dog letting loose in the street of Parshall.
“The safety of our carriers is paramount,” USPS officials wrote. They added that “nearly 6,000 carriers have been attacked by dogs so far this year.”
“Never had any problems with a dog,” Parshall told KSL.
So, where does all this leave Parshall and her neighbors?
After our calls, a post office manager went out to personally deliver the mail to the residents of Parshalls neighborhood and let them know they were “working” on a solution.
We also contacted Salt Lake County Animal Services, who confirmed that there is an active problem with a dog in the area and in particular a dog owner who has refused to follow the rules for years.