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Two men face felony charges after allegedly bungling an attempt to rob a post office and two postal carriers, court documents show. According to court documents, police used facial recognition on a photo of the suspect on a phone dropped during the robbery.
According to the affidavit, in January 2024, postal inspectors were notified of a burglary at the Paris, Maine post office, where someone entered the building through a window and stole postal equipment, including keys, mail, and a money order printer. Police officers found two iPhones in the snow under the broken window.
“The generic lock screen on one of the iPhones had a photo of a black male and black female. A U.S. Postal Inspection Service (USPIS) analyst was able to use facial recognition software and identified the male pictured on the lock screen as Target Subject Winston McLeod,” the affidavit says. The affidavit doesn’t say what specific software the analyst used.
Six days after the post office was broken into and burglarized, two mail carriers were robbed in nearby Lewiston, Maine. The first carrier described the robber as a Black man wearing a ski mask and armed with a knife, who told her, “give me the mailbox key,” and she gave him her USPS truck keys. The second reported that he said “give me your key or I’ll kill you” at knifepoint, and he gave the robber his postal key.
Later that day, police stopped a car driven by a man named Lance Funderburk, with McLeod in the passenger seat. McLeod gave the officer a fake name, the affidavit says, and was wearing a black balaclava and a baseball cap, while Funderburk had two knives on him. Cops searched the car and found narcotics, as well as several checks with different names inside a Louis Vuitton case. McLeod was arrested for an active warrant, and when he was searched at the police department, police found $4,382 cash in his underwear.
Things get stranger from here. Police contacted Funderburk to come pick up McLeod, but a woman arrived to bail him out and said she was alone. Officers suspected she was lying about being alone, and went outside, where they found the car she drove to the police station in the post office parking lot next door, with Funderburk lying on the floorboards. Police detained him, searched him, and found white gloves dipped with red palms and fingers, lighters, Vaseline jelly, assorted keys, a key fob, a black multifunction tool, $1,005.00 cash, a TD Bank card, a black matte butterfly knife with 4" silver blade and four cell phones.
“Officers placed the keys recovered from the search of Funderburk on the desk in the room in which he was being detained,” the affidavit says. “Surveillance video of the interrogation room in which Funderburk was detained shows that Funderburk stood up while handcuffed and approached the keys, picked up a key, and then appeared to place the key into his pants. Funderburk can be seen moving his hand around the rear of his buttocks. Police later conducted a strip search and the key was not located inside Funderburk’s pants or between his buttocks. It is believed that Funderburk pushed the key inside the rectum to prevent the key from being obtained.”
In March, both McLeod and Funderburk were charged by a grand jury with conspiracy to rob a postal worker, two counts of burglary of a U.S. Post Office, and two counts of robbery of a postal worker. They were also ordered to forfeit to the United States any property “which constitutes or is derived from proceeds traceable to those charges,” according to court documents. It’s not clear from court documents whether this includes the key Funderburk allegedly shoved up his asshole.
McLeod pled guilty to all five counts in July, and Funderburk will likely go to trial before a jury later this year.
