You know that feeling you get when you see the day’s mail is just a collection of junk — circulars, promotional postcards and credit card offers? One mailman felt that same frustration, only it just made him want to not have to deliver all that stuff and just hide it in his dead mother’s home and a storage facility — about 44,900 pieces of it, all told.

“He wanted to speed up his route,” the city police captain who arrested him last year in a western Kentucky town tells The Courier-Journal. “I think he was lazy.”

The mail carrier had been working for five years when he was arrested on a tip from the owner of the storage facility where he was stashing much of the mail. The owner saw crates inside labeled “U.S. Posal Service” and called both the cops and the postmaster.

Police first found mail in his mother’s house and said that the man insisted that was the only mail he stashed, when that wasn’t true. Officials also said he destroyed about 1,000 additional pieces — most of which were advertising circulars.

But his lawyer said the man was going through a divorce, had kids to take care of and would simply “store” his mail if he couldn’t finish delivering it.

“It’s not that he was stealing anything from it,” his lawyer said, pointing out that that’s just a small part of the 1.2 million pieces he was responsible for. So… the odds are supposed to be in his favor?

For his two years of dumping and destroying mail, he was sentenced by the chief U.S. district judge to six months in jail as well as six months on home incarceration.

He would’ve likely gotten a two-year sentence under federal sentencing guidelines, but the judge said he didn’t steal from the mail and only a few of his 250 recipients on his route lost money. He’s also ordered to pay $14,808 in restitution to local residents, a bank and two other businesses for their losses.

A spokeswoman for the U.S. Postal Service, said, “We take the sanctity of the U.S. mail very seriously and the Postal Inspection Service and the Office of Inspector General prosecute to the fullest extent of the law anyone who violates that trust.”

And yes, everyone is calling this guy Newman, because:

Kentucky mailman hid mail in dead mom’s house [The Courier-Journal]

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