NORTH ANDOVER, Mass. — When you mail a package, you expect it to arrive. When it doesn’t, you expect the carrier to at least know where it is. But that doesn’t always happen - and in the case of a North Andover family, one simple mistake has cost them a deeply sentimental and irreplaceable item.
Tim Campbell says that not a day goes by that he doesn’t remember his late father. Campbell shared that his Dad, Chester, was a quiet man and a war veteran with a fondness for plaid shirts.
“He loved the flannels,” Campbell told Boston 25 News. “He loved the plaid, being a Scotch-Irishman.”
Last summer, Campbell and his wife boxed up Chester’s favorite shirts and pre-paid to ship them to Project Repat in North Carolina. The company turns shirts into quilts, which the couple felt would be a meaningful way to honor Chester’s memory and always hold him close.
At the time, Project Repat tells Boston 25 News it was testing a shipping option using a combination of both FedEx and the U.S. Postal Service. This method required the package be dropped with FedEx to begin its journey, then FedEx would transfer to USPS for final delivery.
Campbell asked one of his employees to mail the package. The employee, seeing both labels on the box, dropped it at the Post Office first.
“They took it, gave him a receipt, and we figured we were all set,” Campbell recalled. “And that’s where things started to go a little sideways.”
Campbell’s shipment included tracking. After noticing the package hadn’t arrived at Project Repat several weeks later, he called the company.
When he told Project Repat about the shipping error, he learned his late father’s shirts were likely confiscated by USPS for mail fraud.
“If it’s dropped off at the U.S. Postal Service first, then they’ve had people investigated for fraud,” Campbell says he was told.
Boston 25 News found similar complaints online. Project Repat confirmed the complaints, telling Boston 25 News: “Because of the confusion that this label format could create, we no longer use that shipping method.”
Project Repat’s CEO said the organization has tried to work with the Postal Service in hopes of helping locate or release shipments mistakenly delivered to USPS first, but that “release decisions are ultimately in the hands of the carrier.”
Campbell says he reached out to USPS and offered to pay the difference in shipping to either release the shirts to Project Repat or return them to North Andover, but he says nothing worked.
Ultimately, he decided to wait, hoping the situation would resolve itself. Campbell says now, he may have waited too long. After a few months, the tracking information stopped working. Last he knew, the box of shirts was in Colorado.
USPS did not respond to Boston 25’s questions about Campbell’s case or allegations that the package was confiscated. When Boston 25 News shared the package’s tracking information, a spokesperson wrote back: “Regrettably, we are unable to determine the whereabouts of this package due to the amount of time that has passed.”
While he owns the mistake of dropping the package with the wrong carrier, Campbell says he expected better from USPS customer service, especially given the package was covered with contact information.
“It has the address of the company, phone numbers,” he said, adding he was certain “somebody’s going to pick up the ball and just say, let’s get this thing fixed. That never happened.”
Almost a year later, Campbell is making peace with the fact he’ll likely never see his father’s plaid shirts again – or the quilt he hoped would be a comfort. But he’s hoping his experience will be a warning to others: don’t wait.
The sooner you report a problem with a delivery, the more likely a carrier can help you resolve it. If something doesn’t arrive as expected, reach out right away. Most offer an online option to report lost or missing mail, along with phone numbers for customer service. You’ll want to make sure you have your tracking information and any receipts. You may also need to know the date, time, and location you mailed the package.
Data available on the USPS website shows the service handled more than 112 billion pieces of mail in 2024, the most recent year for complete information. A survey by the website Postal found more than 15,000 pieces of mail go missing every month. In February, the Supreme Court ruled USPS cannot be sued for intentionally failing to deliver mail.
USPS has also long faced financial pressures. In March, the USPS Postmaster told Congress the agency may run out of money in the next year if it does not raise prices.
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