SAN ANTONIO – At least six people suspected of stealing mail in the San Antonio area have found themselves delivered to the Bexar County jail.
The arrests, which stemmed from separate cases, were made by the Bexar County Sheriff’s Office and the San Antonio Police Department.
As KSAT previously reported on Sept. 11, deputies were acting on a hunch when they stopped a car in west Bexar County. They arrested Cecily Beltran, 37, and Marcos Martinez, Jr., 29, the sheriff’s office said.
Deputies said at the time that they had noticed a suspicious vehicle in the middle of the night on Gold Rush Drive, in a neighborhood off Marbach Road.
When the deputies looked inside the vehicle, they noticed several pieces of mail that had allegedly been stolen from a cluster mailbox on the car floor.
Since that time, sheriff’s deputies and police officers have made at least four more mail theft arrests in separate cases.
In one instance last Tuesday, authorities said they took a father and son, Robert Blalock, Jr., 55, and Robert Blalock, III, 24, into custody on mail theft charges.
In another case that same day, Julio Cesar Hernandez, 45, was also arrested on mail theft charges, officials said.
A BCSO spokesperson was not able to offer specific details on either case.
SAPD provided a report about the Oct. 1 arrest of Martin Sustaita, Jr., 45.
Sustaita is accused of stealing mail from a cluster box at a senior apartment complex on Fredericksburg Road, which is not far from Babcock Road.
The report stated that an outside company monitoring a security camera at the complex notified SAPD about a man in the act of stealing mail.
An officer then responded to the call and stopped Sustaita down the street. According to the SAPD report, the stolen mail was found in a bag he was carrying.
“It’s not fair for someone to come in and take what they want. It’s not theirs,” said Kirk Jensen, who lives at the complex. “But then, he got caught. All the more better.”
“They do it because they think they can get away with it, and bottom line, they can’t get away with it all the time,” Jensen added.
David Lopez, a resident at that complex for several years, said he is “glad” the surveillance cameras worked.
“If some people are still receiving their checks in the mail, I can understand where they’re going to lose out,” Lopez said.
Watch below: How timing and technology are helping investigators catch mail thieves
The combination of technology and good timing, as seen in the thefts in west Bexar County, seems to have helped authorities make this latest cluster of arrests.
However, the arrests may be just small victories in a massive crime wave.
KSAT 12 News has been covering mail thefts in this region for more than a year.
In some cases, the suspects haven’t had to break into mailboxes.
As the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) confirmed in an August 2024 story, some suspects access mailbox clusters using counterfeit keys.
To avoid becoming a victim of mail theft, the USPS recommends collecting mail daily and doing it as soon as possible after it’s delivered.
The agency also suggests having parcels and packages delivered to a post office box instead of a carrier leaving them at your door.
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