Geneseo, N.Y. - Jeanne Ortiz wants to know how anyone could lose a deer head measuring more than three feet tall and nearly as wide. She mailed it at the UPS franchise store in Geneseo in September.
“He said okay, it will be here in about a week and it never got there,” she says.
Ortiz paid nearly $200 dollars to ship the mounted trophy to her mother-in-law in Puerto Rico. One month later it hadn’t arrived. “When you mail something out and they tell you its going to be there in a week you expect it to be there in a week,” Ortiz says. “You paid for those services.”
Instead she tried to track it down. The U.S Post office said there was no record it had been shipped there. A UPS tracking number Ortiz was provided was no help.
“They said ‘Miss, the tracking number isn’t a real tracking number.’ I tried to call and call and he wouldn’t answer phone calls,” she says referring to the UPS franchise owner.
Store owner David Walters says the package was never mailed. “I’m very, very sorry,” he told 13WHAM News in an interview off camera. Walters called it an honest mistake and an isolated incident in his seven years in business.
But 13WHAM News has spoken to two other people with similar complaints. One woman says she is out $600 dollars. The other says after repeatedly complaining her package was discovered in storage.
NY State Police say complaints date back to 2009. However people who filed them did not ask for or keep proper receipts or documentation that might have proven the difference between criminal intent and an honest mistake.
At this time of year when many people are mailing packages, authorities caution people to get details like approximate delivery dates in writing and to keep all receipts and tracking numbers.
Jeanne Ortiz says it was only after she contacted state police that her package suddenly turned up. “The trooper said your package appeared. I said okay, how did it just appear?”
Ortiz says Walters indicated it might have been kept in a “storage area” in his home. A charge he denies. Walters insists he has given Ortiz an apology and full refund.
State Police are now investigating four new complaints. Walters declined comment. Criminal charges have not been filed.
The mounted deer head was shipped via the US Post Office and has arrived in Puerto Rico in time for Christmas. But Jeanne Ortiz says it’s not the end of this ordeal.
She has taken out an ad in the Mount Morris Shopper Newspaper telling her story and asking for others to weigh in about their experience at “a local mailing company in Geneseo.”
“I’m frustrated I have so little recourse other than to do this,” she explains.
