ABC 7 Chicago reporter Samantha Chatman opened her story with a simple, overwhelming image: piles of Amazon packages stacked up like someone turned a front porch into a warehouse. The woman at the center of it, a 79-year-old in Elgin named Pat Hurley, says she didn’t order any of it, and she doesn’t even have an Amazon account.
Yet the packages keep arriving.
Chatman reported that the senior says it’s “not funny,” it’s “not cute,” and she is fed up, because she reported the mystery deliveries to Amazon and says the boxes still kept coming anyway.
Counting them doesn’t make the situation feel better, but it does show how out of hand it got. Chatman said 1,661 Amazon packages have been delivered to Hurley’s home since last summer, a number so high it stops sounding like a mistake and starts sounding like a problem that got ignored too long.
And in the middle of it is a woman living alone, trying to feel safe in her own house, while strangers’ shipments keep showing up at her door.
A Name On The Label Nobody Recognizes
Hurley told Chatman she’s never even had an Amazon account before, which makes the situation hard to explain in the normal way people explain delivery mistakes. The labels have her address, Chatman reported, but someone else’s name.
That name, Hurley says, is “Brenda.”
Chatman said the neighborhood hasn’t heard of a person by that name, which is part of why this has left Hurley unsettled. It’s not like a neighbor’s packages got mixed up for a week and someone can knock on a door and straighten it out.
Instead, it feels anonymous and odd, like the deliveries are coming from a ghost customer.
Hurley, speaking to Chatman, didn’t try to sound dramatic. She sounded nervous in the plain, honest way that comes from being alone and not understanding what’s happening. “I’m disabled, a widow,” she said, explaining she lives alone in a house while all of this is going on, and that it’s making her “a little nervous.”
That fear makes sense, because the packages aren’t just clutter. They’re a reminder that someone, somewhere, is using her home as a drop point, and she doesn’t know why.
“This Has Got To Stop,” Her Son Says
Chatman reported that Hurley’s son – identified in Amazon’s statement as Brian – says the situation has to stop, and he described how long the family has been trying to get help.
He told Chatman they first reported the mysterious packages to Amazon last year and were told to just keep them. But the boxes didn’t slow down. They kept coming, sometimes 20 a day.
At that point, this stopped being a weird inconvenience and became physical labor.
Brian told Chatman it turned into a routine where they were coming over every other day with a dolly, hauling the boxes off the front porch and moving them into the garage. That isn’t a small chore, and it’s not something a disabled elderly woman should be dealing with, especially when she didn’t ask for any of it.
Some of the packages, Chatman reported, weigh over 60 pounds.
Brian described Hurley as having a hard time moving and walking, saying she is weak and can’t lift much of anything. He told Chatman it can even be hard for her to get out of bed in the morning, which makes the flood of heavy boxes feel almost cruel.
If this were happening to a healthy household with a big driveway and a spare room, it would still be maddening. Happening to an older disabled widow, it feels like someone accidentally found the perfect target: a house where packages won’t get tossed back quickly, and where the person inside is too worn down to fight a giant company’s system.
What’s Inside, And Why Nobody Wants To Take It
Chatman said it appears the packages contain art supplies, which is an odd detail because it makes the deliveries sound harmless – until you remember the scale of it and the fact nobody asked for them.
Brian told Chatman they tried donating the items to local schools and charities, but the organizations wouldn’t accept them due to safety concerns. That’s another quiet punch to the gut, because the family tried to do the right thing and still got stuck.
If a school doesn’t know where supplies came from, or whether they’re safe, it makes sense they would refuse. But the end result is that Hurley’s garage becomes the storage unit for someone else’s mystery shipments.
Chatman reported that after donation attempts failed, they called Amazon again, hoping the company would step in and take responsibility for an obvious mess.
Instead, Brian said the next response was basically, “Do the work yourselves.” He told Chatman Amazon instructed them to pull shipping codes from each and every box, file a claim for each one, and then take the packages to Amazon to return.
That’s not a plan; that’s a burden being shifted onto the person who didn’t create the problem.
So the family called ABC7’s I-Team.
“We didn’t know where else to go, what else to do,” Brian told Chatman, while Hurley also said she’d seen the I-Team help other people and didn’t know what she was going to do without outside pressure.
The “Brushing Scam” Question And Amazon’s Response
Chatman said she reached out to Amazon to ask whether this could be part of a “brushing scam,” a scheme where a third-party seller sends unsolicited items to people who didn’t order them.
The point, Chatman explained, is to create a fake “verified buyer” account using the recipient’s address, so the seller can post fake positive five-star reviews and boost product rankings.
Amazon would not say whether Hurley’s situation was a brushing scam, Chatman reported. But a spokesperson did respond with a statement.
In that statement, Amazon said it had reached out and apologized to Brian and his mother for the experience, and said the company is investigating and working toward a long-term solution to prevent it from happening again.
Hurley’s reaction to that, captured in Chatman’s report, sounded like relief mixed with exhaustion. When she heard Amazon was supposedly stepping in, she responded with gratitude, saying, “Oh God yes, thank you,” and calling the help a blessing.
Chatman also reported that Amazon told the ABC7 I-Team it is in touch with the senior and would be arranging another time to pick up all of the packages.
A Pick-Up Attempt That Didn’t Quite Happen
One detail in Chatman’s report made the situation feel even stranger: the family said that after the I-Team got involved, an Amazon driver came by to pick up the packages right before ABC7 arrived.
But the driver left because he didn’t want to be on camera.
That moment almost says everything about modern customer service. A problem can exist for months. The person affected can beg for help. The company can stall, deflect, and issue instructions that feel impossible. Then the second a TV crew is involved, suddenly there’s movement – except it still comes with hesitation, because nobody wants the optics.
To be fair, drivers are often not the ones making decisions, and it’s not their job to take blame for corporate systems. But it shows how fragile the solution can feel when it depends on someone showing up and actually taking action, not just sending emails.
Why This Story Feels So Unsettling
This isn’t just about clutter, and it isn’t just about a confusing shipping error. What Chatman captured is what happens when a giant system collides with a vulnerable person and the system doesn’t have a clean “off switch.”
Hurley’s words about being disabled and alone cut through all the talk of labels and shipping codes, because it’s the human core of the story. A home is supposed to be your space, not a dumping ground for someone else’s business scam or account trick.
And even if this does end soon, the bigger issue remains: it shouldn’t take a TV investigation for a 79-year-old widow to get a basic problem solved. When a company is powerful enough to deliver 1,661 boxes to the same door, it should also be powerful enough to stop the deliveries when the person inside says, “I didn’t order this.”
Chatman’s reporting leaves the family hoping the mystery is close to being resolved, with Amazon promising to pick up the packages and work toward a long-term fix. But the frustration in Hurley’s voice – and the mountain of boxes behind her – makes one thing clear: she’s not asking for a favor anymore, she’s asking for her life back, one empty porch at a time.
A former park ranger and wildlife conservationist, Lisa’s passion for survival started with her deep connection to nature. Raised on a small farm in northern Wisconsin, she learned how to grow her own food, raise livestock, and live off the land. Lisa is our dedicated Second Amendment news writer and also focuses on homesteading, natural remedies, and survival strategies. Lisa aims to help others live more sustainably and prepare for the unexpected.
