Postal Program Delivers Peace of Mind to Elderly

Letter carrier Zaldy Delacruz was delivering more than junk mail and bills the other day as he walked between the tidy bungalows and duplexes south of Willoughby Avenue in Hollywood.

He was bearing good news for elderly residents who live alone.

From now on, Delacruz and about 5,000 other Los Angeles postal carriers will be keeping an eye on senior citizens and disabled people living on their residential delivery routes.

If they notice mail piling up or signs of an unusual occurrence at a house, they will notify postal supervisors, who in turn will call authorities.

The new Carrier Alert program is free to residents age 60 or older and disabled people who live in 90000-series ZIP Code postal zones in Los Angeles. Soon, officials hope to expand it to San Fernando Valley areas with 91000-series ZIP Codes.

Residents who sign up for the service will receive a Carrier Alert decal. The tiny black-and-white sticker will remind mail carriers to look for anything suspicious at that address.

“A lot of time we’re the only person that some people see all day,” Delacruz explained as he stopped at Clarence “Doc” Ochsner’s home of 53 years to show him one of the stickers.

“It’s a good idea. We’ll go for it,” said Ochsner, 78, as his wife, Norma, nodded.

Sign-up forms for the service are available at the city’s 38 senior citizen centers or from the Department of Aging at (213) 368-4000, according to Ann Delorise Smith, the agency’s general manager.

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Smith said Carrier Alert is similar to a national program that was attempted in 1982. “It kind of fizzled and died out by about 1990,” she said.

Local postal officials resurrected the concept last fall in West Hollywood in response to the death of a 72-year-old woman who was locked by robbers in a closet at her Crescent Heights Boulevard home.

Carol Fuller, a widow, was found to have died of starvation about two months before her body was discovered. Fuller’s mail delivery had been halted by her carrier when nobody collected it from the mailbox. But authorities were not summoned until a neighbor wondered why Fuller had not been seen for a while and called sheriff’s deputies.

Since launching Carrier Alert, West Hollywood’s 83 mail carriers have sounded the alarm only once. That came at Christmas, when an elderly woman left home on a holiday visit without remembering to call to have her mail delivery temporarily stopped, said Joyce Patterson, West Hollywood post office station manager.

Experts on aging say about 600,000 senior citizens live in Los Angeles. That total grows to an estimated 1.5 million when all elderly residents of Los Angeles County are counted.

City officials plan to meet this week with their county counterparts in hopes of expanding Carrier Alert to areas outside municipal boundaries. The program will be extended into the San Fernando Valley when meetings with postal union leaders there can be arranged.

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Postal authorities say this is not the first time that cooperation has been sought between mail carriers and the public in Los Angeles.

Besides annual pleas for mail patrons to keep their dogs locked up, officials last year asked the public to help keep an eye on mail carriers delivering first-of-the-month welfare checks. In 1994 the Los Angeles region tallied 148 carrier robberies--fully half of all reported in the United States.

Notices sent in early 1995 to residents served by 15 post offices from Los Feliz to South-Central to the Westside said carriers would honk their mail truck horns three times to signal their arrival.

“When you hear the horn, it would be most appreciated and beneficial if you would come outside, maybe to work in the yard, work on your car, walk the dog, or just visit your neighbors,” the notices stated. “When would-be thieves see potential witnesses keeping an eye on the mail and the letter carrier, they will leave instead of stealing your mail.”

That program “has had a tremendous effect” in reducing attacks on mail carriers, said Pamela Prince, a postal inspector in Los Angeles. Where 56 carriers were robbed during a five-month period ending March 1, 1995, only 18 were victimized during a similar period that ended Friday.

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Los Angeles Postmaster Jesse Durazo suggested that the Carrier Alert program will be just as successful. “Letter carriers are in the best position to know” if senior citizens are victims of medical emergencies or foul play, he said last month in announcing the effort.

Many carriers have always kept an eye on their patrons, of course.

Last year, Hollywood-area carrier Clarence Frye was credited with saving the life of an elderly woman who collapsed in her Orange Grove Avenue home. Frye noticed several days of accumulated mail in her box and, when neighbors wouldn’t investigate, peered in a window and spotted the woman lying on the floor.

Five months ago Koreatown carrier Kenneth Green chased away a robber he caught choking a woman near Wilshire Boulevard, according to postal officials. In October, carrier Mario Gamboa prevented an explosion in a woman’s Ramboz Drive home in City Terrace by hurriedly turning off the gas when he noticed a smell and discovered a severed natural gas line.

Nine-year veteran Delacruz, 37, said he makes a point each day of stopping briefly to chat with older or handicapped residents on his route--even if they aren’t getting mail that day.

Some of the tales he hears from residents such as Marie Allen “give me goose bumps,” he said.

Allen, 81, said she has been mugged five times and kidnapped and robbed once.

“Three years ago two women grabbed me while I was waiting for a bus and took me to the bank and made me withdraw money,” she said. “They took $9,000 that was my burial fund. I’m not kidding.”

Allen told Delacruz she welcomes him putting her “under surveillance,” as she termed it.

And she wasn’t kidding.