After Gift Card Theft, UPS Presents Check to Mt. Pisgah

If there was ever a life lesson about faith and redemption, students and staff at Mount Pisgah United Methodist Church vacation bible school got one Friday afternoon from church and UPS Store officials during the school’s closing ceremony.

Flanked on stage by UPS corporate officers and UPS Store franchisees, spokeswoman Sheryl King presented the congregation with a check for $7,050.

A packed reception hall erupted in deafening cheers.

“We’re really glad we were able to do something to make a difference,” said King, a UPS Store owner in Peachtree Corners for 18 years and co-op president.

The check presentation follows the of 50 Target gift cards valued at $2,000 by a former Johns Creek UPS Store franchise owner and employee at Haynes Market Shopping Center on Old Alabama Road.

The gift cards were intended for relief efforts in tornado-ravaged Tuscaloosa, Ala., following a spate of deadly storms in late April that killed hundreds across the Southeast and all but leveled the city of more than 83,000 and home to the University of Alabama.

Edward Copenhaver, 45, who has since had his operating license revoked by UPS corporate, and store clerk Margaret Carlisle, 26,  both face multiple felony counts of theft after they were captured on in-store surveillance cameras purchasing items with the gift cards in the Alpharetta Target on North Point Parkway.

A hearing in the case has been set for late June in Fulton County Superior Court.

Kristi Bailey, a Mount Pisgah member and schoolteacher at Fidelis Christian School in Cumming, along with her daughter, Julia Bailey, 12, spearheaded the donation drive between both organizations.

In a couple weeks time, mom and daughter had amassed the money and a stack of hand-written cards from students sending their heartfelt prayers to tornado victims and those who were there to help them, Bailey said.

Bailey then took the gift cards and letters on May 12 to the Haynes Market UPS Store located about a half-mile east of the Mount Pisgah campus.

She handed everything over to a store clerk there expecting they’d arrive at her mother’s house in Tuscaloosa the following day. 

But when the package arrived, to their dismay no gift cards were found.

“My heart just sank,” Bailey recalled. “And the UPS Store clerk told me there was really nothing they could do.”

Bailey got the same answer from police–without a way to prove a theft their hands were tied.

But then Bailey remembered she had kept the receipt.

So she called Target. And Target’s loss prevention department based on her receipt record discovered that purchases had been made on some of the gift cards, Bailey said.

From there, Target culled its in-store video archive. And based on the video evidence, Alpharetta Police arrested Copenhaver and Carlisle on felony theft charges.

In the weeks that followed, some 150 metro Atlanta UPS Store franchisees along with its corporate counterpart collected what now amounts to more than three times the original amount of money the youth groups had raised.

King said the money will be sent directly to the Tuscaloosa Tornado Relief Fund.

And that’s music to 12-year-old Grace Cook’s ears.

Cook, a rising seventh-grader at Fidelis Christian School, gave three gift cards to the cause herself, she said.

She described news of the thefts as “worse than the tornado” itself.

“But God can come around and bless us with more money than before,” Cook added.

And God surely did, added Bailey.

“I’m glad the kids got to see this. And how God used it to fulfill his plan,” Bailey said. “God can use a really bad thing and turn it into something great.”

Or, as the scripture reads in Genesis 50:20: As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good in order to bring about this present result, to preserve many people alive.