Video shows Millburn postal carrier assaulted and robbed of keys
A mail carrier was roughed up and robbed of his postal keys on a Millburn resident's front lawn earlier this month, according to police and the account of an eyewitness, who also captured it on video.
Two suspects had been following the carrier while he worked his route along Walnut Avenue near Mountainview Road on May 13 at about 3:30 p.m., the Millburn Police Department said.
"My wife was upstairs, and I said, 'Elaine, they're attacking the postman; call the police,'" said Lenny Weiland, who saw the robbery play out on his own lawn and captured the attack on surveillance video.
"For some reason, the night before, I changed the parameters to make it wider," he said of his digital surveillance camera, which missed not one second of the brief and chaotic encounter.
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The victim was working his way south on Walnut Avenue when two suspects accosted him, demanding his postal keys, police said, which included a skeleton key used to open mailboxes inside apartment buildings, called an "arrow key," according to the U.S. Postal Service.
"I got my arrow key stolen from me," the carrier says to a 911 dispatcher immediately after the assault, as seen on Weiland's video footage. "They're the keys that go to the apartments."
"I have a feeling they were walking around earlier," he tells dispatch.
As Weiland later explained to NorthJersey.com, the two assailants appear to have hidden between a dumpster and a storage unit parked on his neighbor's property. In the surveillance footage, they run out from between the massive containers and grab the carrier, who begins yelling for someone to call 911.
He momentarily breaks free from their grip before one of the suspects shoves him, forcing the postal worker into a series of tumbles across Weiland's lawn, coming to a halt at the edge of the witness's driveway.
As seen in the video, the carrier gets up just in time for the two robbers to press him against one of Weiland's cars and shake him down before running off.
"What'd that take? Thirteen seconds," Weiland asked rhetorically as he played back footage of the mugging. The robbers fled to a waiting getaway car, described by police as a silver Mercedes-Benz sedan.
"The only part you could see was their hands," Weiland said of the suspects, whose appearance was obscured by long pants, hoods and facemasks. "They're pretty concealed."
Fortunately, the carrier suffered only minor injuries from the fall.
"I'm happy they didn't have a weapon," Weiland said, adding that crime in his neighborhood is usually relegated to vehicle thefts. "As far as home invasions or something as violent as what took place, no."
Millburn police declined to comment on the investigation, which was ongoing when the department first confirmed the robbery.
As of Friday, the U.S. Postal Inspection Service had not responded to a request for information about the case.
This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: Millburn NJ postal carrier robbed of apartment building keys
