500 pieces of stolen mail found in Charlotte woman's car, police say

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Police in east Charlotte are sorting through hundreds of pieces of mail, trying to find people who had letters, tax forms and credit cards stolen out of their mailboxes in the last week.

“What I do know is that my W-2 hadn't shown up,” Mary Anne Richards said.

Police found her W-2 form, along with several dozen others, in the pile of stolen mail in a car they stopped on Independence Boulevard in connection with a series of break-ins in nearby neighborhoods.

Officers arrested Lisa Swinson and charged her with four break-ins that happened Tuesday afternoon. They were stunned to find her car full of documents that may have been stolen over the last week.

“We found probably about 500 individual pieces of mail, and inside that mail we found several tax documents -- from W-2s to 1099s to 1098s,” CMPD Capt. Nelson Bowling said Wednesday afternoon.

Bowling said they also found credit cards and some checks, and believe Swinson planned to use them for fraud.

“The information that Ms. Swinson had would've been instrumental in identity theft,” said Lt. Tom Barry, of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department’s Fraud Investigations Unit.

Barry said they don’t believe Swinson had actually had a chance to use that information yet, but it is still very unsettling for Richards.

“Now people know where I work, where I live, and have my Social Security number, and that is just frightening,” she said.

Anyone with information on the case is asked to call Crime Stoppers at 704-334-1600.

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