‘Stressed’ Amazon driver ditches 80 packages in the woods, police say (original) (raw)

In a pre-Christmas mystery, a police officer in southeastern Massachusetts discovered a clutch of more than 80 Amazon packages nestled beneath a tree — or rather, several trees — in a wooded area of Lakeville early Sunday.

The sergeant was on a 2 a.m. patrol when he spotted the haul of three large Amazon totes spread out in the woods, the Lakeville Police Department said in a news release. Police had the items loaded into a pickup truck and taken back to the station to be inventoried, the department said. Lakeville is about an hour south of Boston.

Police were still puzzling over where the items came from, with no recent reports of misplaced or stolen packages, before handing them over to an Amazon distribution center in nearby Middleborough, Massachusetts, for redelivery. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)

The mystery was ultimately short-lived: An overwhelmed delivery driver visited the police department to explain that they had left the packages on the side of the road around 7 p.m. on Saturday “because they were stressed,” police said.

Body-camera footage showed a Lakeville Police Department officer discovering Amazon packages left in a wooded area Dec. 22 in Lakeville, Massachusetts. (Video: Lakeville Police Department)

Lakeville Police Chief Matthew Perkins praised Sgt. Shawn Robert for probably saving “a Christmas headache for many local residents” by spotting the packages and getting them back to Amazon. The driver was not identified, with Perkins stating that the matter was not a criminal one but a human resources issue for Amazon.

As for the intended recipients, a spokesperson for Amazon told The Post on Thursday that the items were redelivered and made it to their destinations on time.

Drivers who can’t fulfill a delivery or don’t feel safe on their route are encouraged to report back to their employer, the spokesperson said, stating that delivery drivers are third-party employees hired through contractors. A regional National Labor Relations Board director earlier this year, however, disagreed with the company and determined that Amazon is a joint employer of some of the thousands of contract drivers. That case will be heard by an NLRB administrative law judge in March.

Amazon workers went on strike at a handful of large facilities in areas including Atlanta, New York, San Francisco and suburban Chicago on Dec. 19 in an effort to pressure the company into meeting the Teamsters union at the bargaining table and recognizing that bargaining unit.

correction

An earlier version of this article incorrectly said that the NLRB determined Amazon to be a joint employer of some of the contract drivers. It was a regional NLRB director who did so. The article has been corrected.