Thieves pry open mailboxes at gated Palm Springs community and residents fear they’re not the last

A retired teacher says her cluster mailbox was pried open in broad daylight and a postal supervisor told her hers was one of hundreds of communities hit.

Lisa Lenes said she had never seen anything like it. Her family has lived in Saddelrock Estates, a gated Palm Springs community, for more than 40 years.

In all that time, she says, her mother never once encountered their mailbox being broken into.

Then came last Wednesday.

Lenes, a retired teacher, said she walked out to the bank of cluster mailboxes in the middle of her street around 3:30 in the afternoon and found the whole unit broken open. 

A note was taped to the front telling residents to go collect their mail at the post office. Her box was empty.

"Everything was open," she said. "Everything was open."

She said she called police, then drove to the main post office in Palm Springs to find out what had happened and when it would be fixed. 

Lenes said the supervisor told her her community was one of more than 200 hit by mailbox break-ins across the area, and with only one person cutting replacement keys, repairs could take anywhere from a couple of weeks to a year.

News Channel 3 has not independently confirmed those figures.

The timing of the break-in, she believes, wasn't luck. The boxes were fine the day before.

On the day they were hit, landscapers were out mowing, she says enough noise to cover the sound of a lock being forced. Her community sits behind a gated arm that lifts for residents, but she figures someone could have slipped in during the day, worked fast and kept a getaway car waiting on a side street.

For the people who live around her, Lenes says, this lands harder than a missed delivery. She estimates more than 85 percent of her neighbors are seniors, many of them snowbirds who winter in the desert and spend the rest of the year in Canada, Oregon and elsewhere. 

“A lot of them don't drive. They take cabs to run errands, or walk in the heat,” she explained. “That's their Social Security checks. That's their bills.”

Many of her neighbors, she added, aren't mobile enough to chase down missing mail.

 "It's horrific. It's horrifying."

She says she isn't alone. While she was at the post office, a couple in line behind her told her their community had been hit the week before. 

Lenes later said she had to track down her mail carrier's truck near Saddle Rock and show her ID just to recover a few days worth of held mail.

News Channel 3 has reached out to the U.S. Postal Service and the Palm Springs Police Department for more information, including how many communities have been affected and whether the thefts are part of a broader pattern.