Postal Carrier

A U.S. postal carrier has been sentenced to one year in jail and placed on three years' probation for sexually assaulting an office worker along his El Monte mail route. John D. Matthews, 52, of Baldwin Park, pleaded no contest Monday to one count of unlawful penetration with a foreign object. In exchange for the plea, charges of rape, oral copulation and false imprisonment were dismissed. An earlier trial ended in a hung jury.

"Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these (Greek) couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds," wrote Herodotus in the 5th Century BC. Today, this statement, inscribed on the New York City Post Office, serves as the U.S. Postal Service's unofficial motto about mail deliveries. But the Postal Service will make an exception for dogs on the loose. Man's best friend is not always a favorite with postal carriers along their routes.

A 52-year-old career postal carrier described as a model employee as "mellow and friendly as could be" shot his wife to death Thursday morning and then drove about half a mile to work, where he shot and killed two co-workers and wounded a third before he shot himself in the head, police said. The gunman, identified by police as John Merlin Taylor, was on life-support systems at Palomar Medical Center and described by authorities as "brain dead." The weapon for his rampage was a .

A 69-year-old Cypress man was in serious condition Tuesday, suffering from dehydration and pneumonia after being pinned under a mattress in his home for 4 days, police said. Chester Rasmussen, a widower who lived alone, apparently fell out of bed and accidently pulled the mattress on top of himself while trying to get up, Cypress Police Lt. John Schaefer said. Officers were called to the home in the 5300 block of Cumberland Drive on Monday by neighbors and a postal carrier who became concerned about Rasmussen's well-being when he did not pick up his mail for several days.

A federal appeals court on Thursday reversed the conviction of a South-Central Los Angeles man for the shotgun murder of a U.S. postal worker as she was delivering mail to his house. Ruling that the trial judge improperly admitted evidence of the defendant's past violent acts, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously ordered a new trial for Kerry Lynn Brown, who is serving a life sentence for the first-degree murder conviction. Brown, 28, was found guilty by a federal jury of the April 26, 1986, killing of mail carrier Dale J. Hooker, a 12-year postal employee who was struck by a single shotgun blast as she stood on the porch of Brown's parents' home.

Dave Flores arrived at work at 5:30 a.m Saturday, hoping to get a head start on what promised to be an ugly day. It didn't help. Flores, a Santa Ana mail carrier, had hoped to start on his route of 500 homes by 10 a.m. But by 9:30, he still had about 2,000 pieces of mail to sort. With only days left before the election, the workload for Orange County postal carriers has almost doubled. They get up before dawn and work late into the evening, delivering hundreds of thousands of campaign mailers.

A postal carrier was charged with assault for spraying a 7-year-old boy with dog repellent after the boy squirted him with a water gun. Rodney D. Denison, 38, sprayed the youngster last week as he delivered mail in a residential neighborhood, a postal official said. He was charged with third-degree assault, a misdemeanor, and released on $1,000 bond. The charge carries a maximum penalty of one year in jail and a $1,000 fine.

A 20-year-old Huntington Beach man who killed a postal carrier was sentenced Friday to 26 years to life in prison. Orange County Superior Court Judge Jean M. Rheinheimer sentenced Gabriel Deluca for the murder of Ida Jean Haxton, 30, who was the first postal carrier ever killed while on duty in Orange County. The defense conceded that Deluca, a high-school dropout and part-time student at Orange Coast College, killed Mrs. Haxton, a mother of two boys.

I am writing in reference to the Aug. 22 article in the San Gabriel Valley section entitled "Discontent of Postal Workers Reported Growing in Valley." As one of the organizers and authors of the petition circulated among employees of the Alhambra Post Office, I feel that the statements presented by management officials Mr. (Reginald) Martin and Mr. (Hector) Godinez concerning the degree of labor-management tension in the post office are misleading. Their statements seem to imply that only a few employees were discontented.