‘Kindly grandma’ mail thief who struck Charlotte neighborhoods gets 5 years

The “kindly grandma” who stalked the mail in multiple Charlotte neighborhoods needs to file a change-of-address form.

In coming years, Charles Morgan Harrell will be receiving her mail in federal prison.

On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Ken Bell sentenced the Charlotte resident and career criminal to 60 months of custody followed by two years of supervised release.

The actual charge listed in Harrell’s plea agreement is bank fraud. Court documents fill in a whole lot of relevant details.

“Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds,” as the post office motto puts it.

Prosecutors say the 58-year-old Harrell was equally resolute in amassing a 40-year resume of financial crimes. Her most recent illegal enterprise operated in North Carolina and at least two other states, and she used the mail she stole from multiple, high-end south Charlotte neighborhoods as the coal to fuel her criminal engines.

She pocketed blank checks and used the personal identification information she pilfered to cash them. She amassed dozens of phony driver’s licenses and other IDs bearing her photo and the names of her identify-theft victims, which she then leveraged to move thousands of dollars of stolen money through multiple banks. She rented apartments — including one in pricey SouthPark — and bought at least one car.

Court documents say Harrell was caught several times on neighborhood videos, cruising on the wrong side of the street through her targeted neighborhoods, her arm jutting out the window of her car and into mailboxes. When she was confronted at one location, Harrell said she was delivering flyers, and drove on.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Charlotte says Harrell’s scheme surfaced as early as January 2020 and ended only with her arrest in February 2021 outside a Starbucks near SouthPark. Prosecutors estimate her total take for a year of illicit work at almost $220,000.

“This conduct violates individuals’ fundamental expectations of safety and confidence in the United States mail system,” Harrell’s prosecutor wrote in one filing. “Nothing is more basic than going to your mailbox expecting to retrieve mail once it has been delivered.”

‘She’s a jerk’

One of Harrell’s favorite hunting spots were the mailboxes along Greencastle Drive, off Sharon Road, where neighbors say their mail began disappearing around Christmas 2020, and where Harrell made one trip too many.

On Feb. 15, 2021, as reported by The Charlotte Observer, resident Lacy Hayes returned home just in time to see a driver pull mail from his mailbox.

When Hayes reached into the car and took the keys, the tall woman behind the wheel — jail records indicate Harrell is 6 foot 7 — hit him with her cellphone. That didn’t stop Hayes from taking photos of the driver and her vehicle before Hayes let her drive off.

A neighbor, Nicole Kern, then paid to use an online facial recognition site to identify Harrell in Hayes’ photos.

“She found a gold mine in our neighborhood,” Kern told the Observer. “She looks like a kindly grandma. She’s a jerk.”

On Tuesday, Assistant U.S. Attorney Caryn Finley recommended a sentence for Harrell of 46 to 57 months. Finley’s sentencing memo tracks Harrell’s criminal history back to her teenage years. It includes more than two dozen arrests and convictions for financial crimes, many of them occurring while Harrell was on probation for other offenses.

“Intervention by law enforcement has no immediate impact on (Harrell’s) behavior,” Finley wrote. “(S)he has been prosecuted by local, state and federal authorities and has served as much as three years in jail, only to re-offend immediately,” repeatedly showing “her disregard for established rules and the authority of the courts.”

Bell apparently agreed. He gave Harrell three months more than the maximum sentence Finley sought.