‘Kindly grandma’ who stole mail from Charlotte neighborhoods pleads guilty to bank fraud
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to Charles Harrell’s guilty plea on Wednesday, March 2, 2022, to a bank fraud charge.
The “kindly grandma” who waged a one-woman war on the mail in multiple south Charlotte neighborhoods pleaded guilty in federal court on Wednesday to running an identity theft conspiracy that pilfered hundreds of thousands of dollars from residents and banks in three states.
In an agreement with prosecutors, Charles Morgan Harrell, 58, appeared before U.S. Magistrate Judge David Cayer in the uptown federal courthouse to enter a guilty plea to one count of bank fraud aiding and abetting. A second charge of aggravated identity theft was dropped.
According to her plea documents, Harrell roamed the streets of south Charlotte and parts of Georgia and Virginia to steal mail and personal information, which she used to cash stolen checks.
Using the personal information she found in the stolen mail, Harrell obtained and used dozens of phony driver’s licenses that bore her photograph and the names of her identity-theft victims to move thousands of dollars of stolen money through accounts she opened in numerous banks.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Charlotte alleges that Harrell’s scheme surfaced as early as January 2020 and ended only with her arrest in February 2021 outside a Starbucks in the SouthPark area.
Harrell’s undoing: She appears to have gone back to steal from the same south Charlotte neighborhood one time too often.
‘Gold mine’ in south Charlotte
The neighbors along Greencastle Drive off Sharon Road had long been on the lookout for the roving thief who had been raiding their mailboxes since Christmas 2020. They exchanged mass texts when the mail arrived or installed fancy, theft-resistant mailboxes. Still their mail disappeared.
On Feb. 15, 2021, as reported by the Observer, Lacy Hayes was returning home just in time to see a driver pull mail from his mailbox.
When Hayes reached into the car and took the keys, the woman behind the wheel hit him with her cell phone. That didn’t stop the homeowner from taking photos of the driver and her vehicle.
Another neighborhood resident, Nicole Kern, paid to use an online facial recognition site to identify the suspect in the photos.
“She found a gold mine in our neighborhood,” Kern told the Observer. “She looks like a kindly grandma. She’s a jerk.”
Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police would not identify the suspect at the time. But court documents in Harrell’s case place her on Greencastle Drive, accusing her of stealing mail there starting in late January 2020.
This story was originally published February 26, 2022 at 7:30 AM.
