Grandmother collects trail of discarded mail, including checks, cards and car decals

HENRICO COUNTY, Va. (WTVR) - When a grandmother in Virginia found mail scattered throughout her neighborhood, she couldn’t let it go unnoticed.

Marsha Witherspoon took the time to pick it up and turn it in to the local post office.

Her routine morning errand took an unexpected turn.

Witherspoon was heading to breakfast after dropping her granddaughter off at day care when something caught her eye along Brittles Lane and Farrand Street in Henrico.

“I just saw some papers in the ground, in the floor, in the street, so I kept driving a little bit and I said, ‘Wait, that’s mail,’” Witherspoon recalled.

She turned around and what she found was startling; nearly a quarter-mile of scattered mail.

“Wow, that could be my mail. In my head, I’m thinking that could be something I’m looking for,” Witherspoon said.

The envelopes were addressed to people across the state, from Henrico to Fredericksburg, Farmville and even Appomattox.

“The mail was everywhere, like coming from everywhere,” Witherspoon said. “It was so much mail. I feel like we was never going to finish. It was just so much mail.”

Witherspoon says she found checks, car decals and even birthday cards with contents missing.

“You don’t realize, understand the importance of mail until you’re waiting for certain documents to come in the mail,” Witherspoon added.

She spent over an hour collecting as much as she could.

“I always have the mindset that I would want somebody to do it for me because that I could have been looking for a check. I could have been looking for my own decals on my truck,” Witherspoon said.

Witherspoon turned the mail she collected over to a nearby U.S. Postal Service location and reported the incident.

“It could be a matter of a life and death of a document that was just threw out the window. You don’t understand the importance of mail or the importance of people waiting for certain documents to come in the mail,” Witherspoon repeated.

While the U.S. Postal Service looks into how the mail was lost, Witherspoon hopes doing the right thing helped someone who needed it.

“Hopefully, it gets to the right place,” Witherspoon said.

A spokesperson from the U.S. Postal Service confirmed they’re looking into the incident.

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