The Delaware Republican Party is calling out a U.S. Postal Service worker after a Townsend homeowner caught the man stealing his Donald Trump sign using a trail camera mounted to a nearby tree.
Delaware GOP spokesman John Fluharty told a homeowner who lives near U.S. 13 and Chestnut Lane and wishes to remain anonymous purchased a trail camera and set it up late Wednesday evening after repeated sign thefts from his property, WDEL reports.
Around 11:50 a.m. the next day, the camera snapped two pictures about 30 seconds apart, one showing a man dash from his U.S. Postal Service vehicle towards the sign and the other with the sign missing and the man reaching inside the vehicle.
The homeowner forwarded the pictures to the Delaware Republican Party, which issued a statement about the thefts.
“We find this event disturbing on a number of levels,” Fluharty said in the statement. “It’s one thing for candidates and political parties to disagree. It is another for their supporters to engage in illegal activity.”
The “juvenile behavior,” Fluharty told The News Journal, “is something that has to stop.”
“In the final days of the campaign, this is something that has become a pattern of behavior in the last two cycles,” he said.
The U.S. Postal Service Office of Inspector General also issued a statement.
“Special agents with the U.S. Postal Service Office of Inspector General responded to this issue as soon as it was brought to our attention,” spokesman Scott Balfour wrote. “The individual in the photographs was identified and will be dealt with appropriately by postal management after a thorough review of all the facts.”
Both the Postal Service and the Delaware GOP were quick to point out that the thieving postal worker is not a reflection of federal mail employees in general.
“What this gentleman is not is a representative of the many postal workers working out of the Townsend postal office,” Fluharty said.
“This appears to be unacceptable behavior that does not reflect the efforts of the thousands of professional, dedicated employees in our workforce,” USPS spokesman for our region, Ray Daiutolo, Sr., told WDEL.
According to The News Journal:
The incident comes on the heels of the defacing of a La Mar Gunn campaign sign, a GOP candidate for lieutenant governor and head of a local NAACP branch. Feces was found smeared on his political signs, and other campaign materials were reported to have been vandalized. Months earlier, Gunn also found campaign signs on his porch had been urinated on.
“Republicans in Delaware have run a strong ticket and Democrats feel threatened, and when that happens, you see a lot of activists engage in this type of behavior,” Fluharty said.
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