FedEx Loses Dying Woman's Items Meant For Family

The last wish of a dying woman was to send some of her precious belongings to family members.

But those items were never delivered.

Now a Bothell couple is now claiming that FedEx simply threw them away.

Mark Ison always had a special relationship with his aunt, Sharon Butcher. So weeks before the Fort Walton Beach, Florida woman died of cancer, Butcher packed a box full of household items for her nephew and his wife, Janine. Janine Ison admits the items were “not anything of any major value monetarily, but huge sentimental value.”

Her husband adds his aunt “didn’t have a lot of material things. So they were just items that were important to her, and therefore important to us.”

Also in that FedEx box -- a letter "that would have been the last communication that we had from her,” said Mark.

But the Isons will apparently never know what that letter said, because the FedEx package never arrived.

Janine had known the box was coming. So when weeks passed with no delivery, she started making phone calls, and tracked the package online. According to the shipment history, the 20-pound box made it as far as Kent, Washington, where it was determined that FedEx couldn't deliver the package because it had been damaged.

Janine says she then called the Kent FedEx facility to see where the package went next. “He told me that on his report he showed that three items were destroyed,” Janine tells KIRO 7 Consumer Investigator Amy Clancy. “I asked him, well, where are they? Can I get them? I would like to have the box and whatever is there. And what about these other items? He didn’t know anything about the other items but said, honestly, they were probably thrown in the garbage.”

“I don’t understand that,” Mark says. “Why would they just arbitrarily make that decision and throw away something that contained items that were obviously important to somebody?”

What bothers the Isons most, besides the fact they'll never have Aunt Sharon's keepsakes, is that they say no one from Fed Ex ever contacted them to let them know the package wasn't coming.

Janine says their phone number was clearly on the label.

The Isons would also have liked to have had the option of receiving a box with broken items.

“Understanding that things do get broken in shipment,” Mark tells Clancy, “we would still have wanted to have had those items, broken or not.”

“It’s unbelievable that we would have been left out of the loop in that way,” says Janine.

Clancy called FedEx to ask about the company's policies when a shipment is damaged: why the box wasn't delivered and why the Isons weren't given the option to receive it anyway?

Media spokeswoman Janella Laoiza declined to provide any details other than what's available on the company's tracking website. Laoiza cited "privacy" concerns.

FedEx did send the couple a check for over $100, even though the Isons never filed a claim and say they don't want the money. They simply want the package.

“The sentimental value is beyond any dollar amount that FedEx could, they can’t write a big enough check to replace,” says Janine.

Adds her husband, “I’m not a very emotional person in general, but this has been really tough for me.”

While talking with FedEx, Clancy repeatedly tried to get answers about what eventually happened to the package. Despite a detailed shipping history of everything that happened to the box between Florida to Kent there’s nothing about where its journey ended.

Hours before Clancy’s investigation was to air on TV and be published on the web, Rob Boulware of FedEx Ground called Clancy to say that, even though the company still doesn’t know what happened to the package, the incident is being “investigated at the highest levels to make some something like this never happens again.” Boulware also reveals that FedEx is currently examining its policies regarding damaged packages.