Another rat has made a name for himself and that name —Mail Rat — will go down in infamy… as soon as the exterminator’s traps get him.
A woman in Bedford-Stuyvesant could not figure out why she wasn’t receiving her postal mail.
“She thought it was the post office’s fault and was complaining to them,” James Molluso of Northeastern Exterminating told Brooklyn Paper.
On July 13, Molluso solved the mystery. He found 35 unopened bills and other correspondence under the woman’s brownstone stairs on Halsey Street near Bedford Avenue.
Mail Rat, as Molluso dubbed him, would grab the mail that a postal worker tossed on the landing (instead of putting it in the mailbox). Rats are collectors of random junk and use it make their nests. Molluso told Brooklyn Paper that he has seen vermin nests made of baby toys and pill bottles.
“I noticed a whole bunch of garbage, sifted through it and saw a lot of mail in that area,” Molluso told Gothamist. “It was shredded. You could tell that was where the rat was pulling mail into.”
“The mailman was throwing mail by the front door, so the rat would pull the mail into a little spot to use as nesting material, to kind of hide away from everybody,” Molluso added.
Rats make cozy nets for their pups when they reproduce.
“It wasn’t a surprise to me, you see all kinds of stuff,” he told Brooklyn Paper. “Generally, it’s pretty much anything they can find.”
“I recently saw under a sink, that rats were pulling in underwear, socks, insulation from the walls,” Molluso told Gothamist. “If a rat problem gets bad, they can actually take things from people, even money. Most of the time they’re going to take invaluable things, but there is the possibility of them taking things of value.”
Mail Rat faces the ultimate penalty for his crimes: death. Molluso laid bait traps and the dead rat walking has about two days left to enjoy his boosted spoils.
