This story has a happy ending, but it took 6 1/2 years.
In October 2006 Joan Najbar opened her mailbox one afternoon and found a returned letter she had sent two weeks earlier to her son serving in the Army National Guard in Iraq. In red letters, the envelope was stamped "DECEASED."
A frantic Najbar found out later that night that her son was still alive. But the Duluth woman never was able to determine who had stamped the word on the letter, or if it had ever even left the Duluth post office.
Her son has since left the military and is safe back home. Postal inspectors and the Office of the Inspector General investigated but could never conclude the origin of the stamp on the letter. But Najbar never let go.
A malicious stamp on a letter may seem like a small thing, but its symbolism had broader implications about how a government behaves when it is at war and only a small percentage of its citizens are doing the fighting.
It was right before the 2006 election. She was active in the antiwar movement at the time. Other mothers she was working with in opposing the war received death threats and harassing late-night phone calls.
"If we are a nation of war, we need to act like it," Najbar said. "I couldn't handle it if it happened again. You are a government agency handling soldiers' mail during wartime, you better get your act together. What it said to me was that soldiers and their families are invisible."
She sued the Postal Service in 2009, saying she experienced emotional distress and lost income. In 2011, an appeals court ruled that she couldn't sue for what happened because the Post Office was immune from liability. The court did admit in its ruling that she "was injured in an uncommon way, one in which we might not ordinarily expect the Postal Service to injure its customers."
