NILAND, Calif. (AP) — It was a special delivery indeed — 13 suspected illegal immigrants from Mexico stuffed in a phony UPS van.
The U.S. Border Patrol said Tuesday that agents stopped the van Friday as the driver tried to circumvent a highway checkpoint near Niland, about 150 miles east of San Diego in California’s Imperial Valley, near the Mexican border.
The van looked like a legitimate United Parcel Service Inc. delivery vehicle, except the company decal on the back door was slightly crooked.
The driver, U.S. citizen Daniel Lopez, was charged in federal court in El Centro with illegal transportation of aliens, authorities said.
Carlos Goens, the driver of another truck, was charged with the same crime after being detained at a Border Patrol checkpoint. He is suspected of coordinating with the UPS van.
Migrants told authorities they had agreed to pay between $5,000 and $8,000 each to be smuggled into the United States, according to the criminal complaint.
An agent reported seeing Goens leave a suspected stash house for illegal immigrants in the town of Brawley, leading authorities to the UPS vehicle. Another agent pulled over the UPS van at a mobile home park in Niland.
Attorneys for Goens and Lopez did not immediately respond to phone messages Wednesday.
Border Patrol agents recently began visiting Imperial Valley businesses and government agencies to warn about smugglers cloning their vehicles, said spokesman Adrian Corona. Telltale signs include misspellings on agency or company logos and crooked decals.
In recent years, smugglers have used fake vehicles of the California Highway Patrol and Imperial Irrigation District.
Last year, a white van filled with 13 illegal immigrants from Mexico dressed as clean-cut Marines were stopped at a Border Patrol checkpoint near San Diego.
A Border Patrol agent who had served in the Marine Corps wasn’t fooled, especially when the driver didn’t know the Corps’ birthday.
Category Archives: UPS
UPS: Brown & Gold or Scaredy Cat Yellow
I buy everything online. I would rather wear a dress, pantyhose and high heels for the rest of my life than go shopping in the physical world. And let me tell you, I would look like a drag queen in that outfit — it’s not pretty and I’m doing everyone a great service by staying out of stores. Anyway, because I shop online so much, I usually have a consistent stream of packages arriving at my house. I have lived in my house for almost ten years and have had four dogs for just about the same amount of time. For ten years I have had UPS and FedEx deliver my online orders with no issues. Moreover, both the UPS drivers and FedEx drivers bring treats for the dogs and get out and pet them. The dogs tails wag in everlasting love as they happily soak up the attention — and snacks. Fast forward to the middle of 2011 and our neighborhood is assigned a new UPS driver. All of a sudden my packages stop being delivered. Instead of packages, I receive a tsunami of paper notifications that cite the packages are undeliverable because the “dogs were out.” Now let me immerse you into reality of this “dogs were out” situation. My dogs are not like Cujo — the rabies-ridden St. Bernard who unleashes a reign of terror on a family. Two of my dogs are chocolate labs. Have ‘ya ever seen a lab? They are incredibly sweet and the only terror they unleash is if you happen to turn your back on your food — they will swoop in and consume it like a seagull. One of my dogs is a Shiba Inu. She is small and looks like a fox. She wags her tail so crazily she looks like a middle-aged woman doing the chicken dance at a wedding. Our forth dog Indy is a rescue dog. We went to the shelter and told them we wanted the dog that nobody wanted and had been there the longest. We think he is an Australian Sheppard/Spaniel mix. He is definitely a barker, but certainly doesn’t foam at the mouth. I was finally able to catch the UPS driver one day and asked him why he wouldn’t deliver the packages. He was surprisingly rude and actually barked at me when he responded. He said he was not going to risk his life to deliver my packages. Excuse me? I never recalled reading that a lab had killed a man. Just to be sure, I Googled “lab kills man.” The only lab that ever killed a man was an exploding meth lab, not a dopey chocolate lab. I went on to tell the driver that we have an electric fence for the dogs, so they couldn’t get on the front walkway or grass. As such, all he needed to do was drive down the driveway and step out his driverside door and directly onto my front walkway. The electric fence means he would never have to be within 10 feet of any of my harmless dogs. He barked at me again and said he refused to do that. I called the local UPS distribution center and spoke to a supervisor. I was very reasonable and calm while I explained the situation. She informed me that this particular driver had been bit by a dog and now feared them. While I empathized with his situation, I explained that I thought that should be UPS’s issue, not mine. A quick Google search identified that 39% of US households own at least one dog — that’s 44.9 million households who own 78.2 million dogs. So here’s my question: Should the customer who owns a dog/s suffer the consequences of a UPS driver who has a fear of dogs or should UPS deal with this issue because the driver is incapable of performing his duties? I’m pretty sure if a person was afraid of water (Aquaphobia), they wouldn’t be hired as a lifeguard. Or if someone was afraid of riding in a car (Amaxophobia), they wouldn’t be hired as a limo driver. So if 44.9 million households in the US have dog/s, how can someone with a fear of dogs (Cynophobia) be hired as a UPS driver? Do you think UPS brand colors should be brown and gold or, perhaps more appropriately, brown and scaredy cat yellow?
Posted on the Kel Kelly Blog
What Can Brown Do For You?
An interesting series of events took place recently with United Parcel Service (UPS). I arrived home from work the other day to discover a package sitting in a flower bed near my back door. It had a UPS-generated address label, made out to our address, but using my wife’s maiden name (which she has not used since the 90′s). We then got to looking closer at the mailing label. We peeled it back and discovered an original mailing label that was addressed to the same person who’s name was on the prescription bottles. Her address was different than ours, and was located in a city some 60 miles from where we lived. We couldn’t imagine why UPS would take it upon themselves to cover up the original mailing label and generate a new one, for a person with a different first name and address, and in a different city. I called the prescription company who shipped the package, and they too were at a loss as to why this might happen. The prescription company thanked me, and said they would send their patient out a new package immediatey, and I assured them I would send the package back. A few days later guess who shows up at our door? You guessed it. UPS…with yet another package for the same poor lady, again with the original mailing label – showing a different person at a different address – covered up with a new UPS label changing the recepient to my wife’s maiden name at our address. I explained the whole story to the driver and he indicated he would return the package to the shipper. The next day I took the 1st package to my local UPS Store to have it returned (I hadn’t been in a hurry to drop it off, since the pharmacy was sending out a new package to the patient). I handed the package to the clerk behind the counter and explained the problem, and that it needed to be returned to the sender. He looked at the label and said, “I can’t take this, if I scan the label into the system it will just come back to you.” By this point I was frustrated and quipped, “At this point I don’t care if you throw it in the trash. It’s not my problem, and it wasn’t my screw-up. Do what you want with it” and I walked out. So yeah Brown, I got something you can do for me… Well, I guess we had this coming… Several weeks ago my wife placed an online order for some new shoes, to be shipped to the elementary school where she works. Imagine her surprise today when my wife received an email from a man named Mark Craig who lives in Canada. Seems he received my wife’s shoes, in a package with a UPS-generated shipping label, showing his name and address. He had opened the package and found my wife’s name and address on the enclosed paperwork, Google’d the school name, found my wife’s email address, and sent her the note. Out of curiosity, when she emailed Mark back, she asked him if there was an original mailing label under the one directing the package to him. She asked if there was a label that showed her name and address. He responded yes, there was such a label in place. So this time UPS didn’t just redirect a package to a different woman’s name, at a different address, in a different city 60 miles away. This time they changed the address label from a woman’s name to a man’s name – and shipped it to a different country.
And the followup posting……………….
My fellow BS’er Bill gave me some good-natured (and deserved) teasing the other day as a result of my recent What Can Brown Do For You? post.
TheBSBlog
Broken Urn Sends Relative’s Ashes Flying
Shedding a tear, Rita Torres struggled as she recalled watching her brother Jimmy’s ashes fly out from an urn into a cloud of dust.
She pulled up a mat in the living room, showing his remains on the floor. Unable to clean them up with her bad knees, she covered the ashes because she was afraid her cat would confuse them for kitty litter.
“It just breaks my heart every time I think of what’s happened to him,” Torres said.
“It hurts.”
Jimmy died of a stroke last month in Washington state. At the request of his guardian, Spokane Cremation and Burial of Spokane shipped his ashes to Torres in an eagle urn.
“When I opened it up and everything started flying out, I said ‘No way!’ That’s his ashes right there.”
Torres says the eagle statue was broken off from the base, leaving a gaping hole. His ashes poured out. Torres initially blamed UPS because she remembered hearing the driver drop her package “hard” in her front yard.
Our investigation uncovered the funeral home never should have shipped the urn through UPS. Shipping “human remains” is against UPS policy, something those in the funeral industry tell us is well known.
“We do adhere to some very strict code of ethics,” said Lisa West with East Lawn Memorial Park of Sacramento.
When we told West about what happened, she and a colleague stopped by Torres’ home, helping her clean up the remains. West says basic industry practice calls for ashes to be bagged, not just placed raw inside an urn.
“With use of something as simple as a plastic bag inside an urn, you avoid any problem no matter what the compromise is to the urn,” she said.
Spokane Cremation and Burial Service owner Bill Rossey told CBS13 by phone that he packed the urn in the box well. He declined an on-camera interview and pointed the finger at UPS and the urn’s manufacturer, suggesting a possible workmanship issue with the urn or rough handling by the shipper.
“I’ve been in the business 15 years,” he said. “I’ve handled thousands of cases with remains and never have I heard anyone say anything about an urn breaking before.”
Rossey had no explanation for breaking UPS rules and claimed he didn’t put the ashes in plastic before placing them in the urn because a bag wouldn’t fit.
But West demonstrated for CBS13 how she’s fit ashes in urns with smaller openings.
The urn’s manufacturer Ziegler and Ames told us, “It was completely irresponsible of Spokane Cremation to have shipped cremated remains in this fashion. … It saddens us greatly that anyone should be subjected to what this woman has gone through.”
The company supplied her with a new urn at no cost. Seeing her brother’s ashes go up in a dust cloud is something Torres can’t get out of her mind.
“I just hope they don’t do this to somebody else,” she said.
UPS Statement
I was able to follow up on this one and I’ve learned that our customer relations group made contact with this customer to apologize for the way the package was delivered. In addition, UPS has issued a goodwill payment in the amount of $300, to cover the replacement of the owl statue that the urn was contained in. (editor note: Torres initially reported it to be an owl urn, but later determined it was an eagle)
However, it is incumbent on the shipper to properly package the item to withhold the shipping environment, as well as adhere to the UPS tariff which states: Items Not Accepted for Transportation includes “Human Remains, fetal remains, human body parts, or components thereof” as not accepted for shipment.
We will follow up with the shipper in this case. Thanks for bringing this to our attention.
— Laurie Mallis
NWCN.com
Ticket
Accident on Busy Highway
Once Upon a Time
Cameras, Cameras, Everywhere
The new DIAD has a built in camera. What’s that camera for? According to all the scuttlebutt the company is putting the camera in the DIAD for additional proof of delivery.
It will allow the driver to photograph the actual delivery point in troublesome areas giving the company more ammunition in the fight over Non-Delivery claims. Of course, who used to go out to analyze deliveries when a claim was made? Supervisors.
Again the new technology is about reducing management, not attacking drivers. Although I’m sure managers, and supervisors will attempt to use it to speed up drivers, the reality is, they will be looking for ways to justify their existence since technology will be used to replace them. It really makes the driver worth another plug nickel in my view.
The latest fear besides the DIAD camera is the “In-Cab” camera. I have not been able to determine that there is an actual plan to install cameras in the cabs, but all of the drivers are convinced that it’s coming. Of course I have been hearing that kind of speculation for years, and have even had to investigate complaints from drivers that secret cameras have been put in trucks to spy on the drivers.
Given todays technology, cameras are a real possibility. Why would the company want them in the cab? Well let’s see, do you pick your nose? Do you scratch your ass while driving?
Really an in cab camera could be used to monitor cell phone usage, distracted driver situations, texting, etc. The company already has the driver wired to see if they are using seat belts, and if the bulkhead door is closed.
The third thing would be safety procedures such as “three points of contact”. Again monitoring that from afar would be the job of a supervisor that again would be in jeopardy of losing their job because of technology. Any low life can watch a monitor, so why pay supervisors a huge amount of money to watch drivers pick their noses.
What should a driver do about cameras? The first thing would be to get informed on the protections provided in the contract regarding new technology and how it can be used in the disciplinary process. The next thing would be to talk to your steward and find out if your paranoia is actually based in fact, and not in fear. Also, get involved in the upcoming contract negotiations to be sure that your rights are addressed in the new contract.
Finally, realize that technological changes in the company are less about disciplining drivers, than about getting rid of a top heavy, non-productive, expensive management system. Remember, managers produce nothing of profit to the company. That’s why every manager, or supervisor seems so desperate to survive.
It’s all about the bottom line.
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