The UPS guy was late.
He usually made his nearly daily deliveries to the Heffner Funeral Chapel and Crematory on Kenneth Road in West Manchester Township in the mornings, but this day, Friday afternoon, July 24, he was running late.
He had one package for the funeral home. It was heavy – about 27 pounds – and to spare the office staff from having to carry it, he placed it on a chair in the office. Judging by its weight, the office staff figured it was heavy-duty body bags or urns.
But administrative assistant Allison Duke noticed something was off with the package. It was addressed to Jen Schaeffer, the staff accountant at the funeral home, at the Kenneth Road address. The return address identified the sender as Jen Schaeffer, at the same address.
Duke called Schaeffer, who was off that afternoon, and Schaeffer told her she hadn’t ordered anything and asked her to open it to see what it was.
When she opened the box, there was another box packed in Styrofoam peanuts. She opened the inner box and saw vacuum-sealed black plastic bags bearing the brand name Covert. Covert is a brand of shipping packaging intended to conceal the contents, used to ship sensitive materials, guns or other less legal products.
There was no odor, and it was not evident what was inside the eight bags packed in the box. Funeral director Todd Eckert happened to walk by and asked what was in the package.
He was tasked with opening the package. He opened one of the Covert bags. Inside was another bag. He opened that bag and inside that one was another. He opened that bag, and immediately he knew something was off. The pungent aroma of marijuana wafted from the bag. “It was distinct,” he said of the odor.
And sure enough, that clear plastic vacuum-sealed bag was full of marijuana buds.
He opened another bag and it contained vacuum-sealed bricks of hashish – branded L.A. Mousse and packaged as if it were ready to sell in a dispensary.
Eckert did some Googling and found that the average wholesale value of the weed and hashish was between $6 to $8 a gram. That meant that 27 pounds of the stuff was worth $89,000. “That’s wholesale,” Eckert said.
They took the package to their boss’ office and called the West Manchester Township Police.
The police officer asked whether anybody had touched the package. Eckert said, “Yeah, everybody touched it.”
The police officer appeared stunned by the size of the package, they said. Usually, he told them, when police find packages of drugs, it’s a small amount, not 27 pounds.
‘That was the end of it.’ Or not.
How 27 pounds of weed and hashish wound up being delivered to the funeral home apparently began on July 13 when Schaeffer opened the funeral home’s UPS bill. The bill usually runs between $40 and $100 a month. This bill had a charge for $778 and indicated that the funeral home had shipped something to Portugal.
It was possible, she guessed. Perhaps the funeral home had shipped some cremains to Portugal on behalf of one the families it served. But that hadn’t happened.
She looked up the tracking of the package on the UPS website and saw that it had originated in California, specifically in Van Nuys in Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley. Heffner has six locations — all in central Pennsylvania and none, obviously, in Van Nuys.
She called UPS. The parcel service investigated and found that it was fraud, that somebody had hacked or pirated the funeral home’s UPS account and used it to make the then-unknown shipment. UPS removed the charge from the funeral home’s account.
“And that was the end of it — until Friday,” Schaeffer said.
From California to Portugal and back
The package, according to the tracking documentation, took a circuitous route to the funeral home.
It had been addressed to a woman in Povoa de Santo Adriao, a suburban town just north of the Portuguese capital Lisbon. A Google search by Eckert indicated that the woman is a psychiatrist.
The package left Van Nuys, and after a stop in Burbank it was shipped to Louisville, Kentucky. From there, it was sent to Cologne, Germany, and after clearing Customs went to Maia, Portugal, where it was held while officials awaited verification of its value from the shipper or the recipient.
It sat in Maia for 12 days, according to the tracking documentation. Since it could not be delivered with the proper verification, on July 22, UPS began the process to ship it back to the sender. It went back to Germany, then to Philadelphia and then to Carlisle and on July 24, at 12:57 p.m., it was returned to the sender.
Who was listed as Jen Schaeffer.
‘A giant box of weed shows up’
The package remains something of a mystery. Who sent it? How did that person, 3,000 miles away, get the address and UPS account information for a funeral home in York, Pa.? Why did someone in Portugal apparently order 27 pounds of marijuana and hashish from California?
West Manchester Township Police referred queries to the York County District Attorney’s office, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Some $89,000 worth of product gone missing might seem like a big deal, but who knows? Weed is big business in California — the legal sector generates $4 billion a year — and 89 grand could be considered an acceptable loss.
The episode provided a lesson.
“Keep an eye on all of your accounts all of the time,” Schaeffer said. If you don’t, she said, one day “a giant box of weed shows up.”
