Post office workers in Scottsdale helped rescue three sealed primary election ballots from a mail thief's car on July 21, primary Election Day, and had them tabulated before the polls closed, according to court documents.
Investigators, who'd previously received a call about a mailbox "trap," arrested 26-year-old Richard Ramos Jr., of Stockton, California on July 21 after a surveillance operation. Besides the ballots, they found uncashed checks, including one for $16,070, and other mail in Ramos' possession, documents said.
The case began in May when people began reporting to the U.S. Postal Inspection Service that they'd had checks stolen from a blue mailbox in front of the Scottsdale Hopi Post Office near Via de Ventura and Pima Road, according
to documents.
On June 30, a witness reported to Scottsdale police they had just seen a person in a blue Tesla seeming to fiddle with the Hopi mailbox. The witness saw the Tesla parked in front of the mailbox for eight minutes, according to a Scottsdale police report. When the witness put a couple pieces of mail in the same mailbox, they noticed the mail had fallen into a cardboard box within the mailbox, the report said.
The Tesla pulled into a parking spot at the post office. As the person retrieved their mail and the cardboard from the mailbox, the Tesla took off suspiciously, according to the report. The witness gave the car's license-plate number to police, who notified postal inspectors.
In early July, post office authorities found several cardboard box traps fashioned from USPS Priority Mail boxes in the same blue mailbox, documents said. Inspectors set up a camera and license plate reader. A post office clerk told supervisors she believed she was being watched while collecting mail from the box, and she found more of the traps inside, documents said. Investigators looked at their video recording and saw a silver, four-door Infiniti pull up to the box and remain there for over two minutes.
At 7:15 a.m. July 21, the Infiniti came back to the mailbox. Inspector Andrea Brandon observed the driver pull out a trap with mail, documents said. The postal inspection team stopped Ramos and took him into custody and went through his contraband, finding the checks and ballots.
A supervisor determined the mail-in ballots were still sealed and hadn't been tampered with, which officials at the Maricopa County Recorder's Office confirmed, an Aug. 3 report to the county Board of Supervisors stated.
Ramos, who told authorities he had no job and had been sleeping in his car before his arrest, was released from jail on July 27. Online records show he had a California security guard license from 2020 to 2022.
He accepted a plea deal from the Maricopa County Attorney's Office after pleading guilty to a Class 6 felony for burglary tools and another undesignated charge for the same crime, according to court records. He was scheduled to be sentenced on Aug. 14 and will receive supervised probation, according to the plea deal terms.
Online records showed he also lives or recently lived in Las Vegas. The Infiniti was registered to another Stockton man who did not respond to a phone message from the Arizona Republic.
Reach the reporter at rstern@arizonarepublic.com or 480-276-3237. Follow him on X @raystern.
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This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Election Day ballots recovered from Scottsdale mail theft case
