Robbery of carrier spurs $50K reward

The U.S. Postal Inspection Service is offering a reward of $50,000 for anyone with information leading to the apprehension and conviction of a suspect in last week’s robbery of a mail carrier in east Las Vegas.

The mail carrier was robbed at 11:20 a.m. Friday at an apartment complex at 2650 Sherwood Street near East Karen Avenue, according to Trevor Hudson, spokesman for the inspection service.

Postal officials released surveillance photos of the suspect in the robbery.

The inspection service has urged those with any information about the robbery to phone its office at 1-877-876-2455 and answer “Law Enforcement” at the prompt.

Any communication “will be kept strictly confidential,” postal officials said.

The service also cautioned the public against acting to apprehend the suspect themselves.

On Dec. 9, a person with a gun robbed a letter carrier’s keys to a residential postal box at 3525 Jungle Drive after the carrier arrived to deliver mail at a townhome complex a block south of East Washington Avenue near North Pecos Road, the service said. It was not clear Wednesday whether an arrest had been made in that robbery.

Despite the recent robbery, such crimes had been trending downward locally from 2021 to nearly all of 2022, according to the inspection service.

Las Vegas and Henderson saw a decrease in stolen mail and packages from the start of 2021 to December 2022, while such thefts increased in North Las Vegas, based figures from a FOIA request by the Review-journal.

In Las Vegas, 2,326 postal items were reported stolen in 2021 compared with 2,202 as of Dec. 20, while thefts fell from 492 to 427 in the same period in Henderson but went from 326 to 390 in North Las Vegas, the service said.