CINCINNATI — A 26-year-old man was sentenced to almost 3 years in federal prison Monday for his role in a string of postal worker robberies around Greater Cincinnati.
Shammon Richard was sentenced to 33 months after he pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit bank fraud.
"If you're caught, and you're prosecuted, you are going to serve a long sentence in a federal penitentiary!" said Ted Thompson, the head of the National Association of Letter Carriers.
Thompson has previously called for justice and harsher penalties for those who target postal workers.
Learn more about the case against Richard in the video below:
According to court documents, Richard was associated with Lamorion Gray and more than a dozen others accused in this crime ring. Gray used a gun to rob a postal worker near Cliffside Drive on July 12, 2023, stealing the carrier's master key and vehicle key.
Gray pleaded guilty to robbing the postal service worker and was sentenced to 7.5 years in prison.
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Richard and Gray aren't the only mail theft suspects recently facing justice. Federal investigators say 22-year-old Lorenzo Brandon and 21-year-old Antonio Toombs, along with another juvenile, targeted mail carriers in two separate incidents in October 2023.
Authorities report the pair robbed two mail carriers of their "arrow keys," the universal keys that can be used to open blue collection mailboxes. Both men also pleaded guilty to two counts of stealing mail or property of the U.S. Postal Service.
Toombs was sentenced to 6.5 years and Brandon to 3.5 years in prison.
"With an electronic key, it becomes almost impossible to get anything out of these letter carriers, so there's no incentive to attack them. That's something we have to expedite," U.S. Rep. Greg Landsman previously said.
The bipartisan "Protect Our Letter Carriers Act" was introduced in the House during Congress's last session. It was designed to speed up the replacement of the Greater Cincinnati area's arrow keys with safer digital keys, but the legislation did not receive a vote before the session ended.
