Evanston home bombarded with packages due to shipping error

EVANSTON, Ill. — Evanston resident Samantha Schwimmer says she has had her share of Amazon packages not addressed to her showing up at her doorstep. 

For at least a year now, Schwimmer says hundreds of Amazon packages for Trulee Evanston, a senior living community a few blocks from her home, keep showing up at her house. 

Trulee Evanston’s address is 1815 Norwood Court. Schwimmer’s address has the same numbers but is not on the same street. 

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“At first it was just an annoyance and then it just got the point like, ‘what a minute, these are senior citizens who probably really need those medications and don’t have other ways of getting it,”‘ Schwimmer said.  

According to Schwimmer, someone from Amazon called her Friday and told her about a possible glitch in their system. 

“If a number of an address is near another number that is similar, the system can confuse the locations,” Schwimmer said.  

 While some of the packages are small, Schwimmer says many are large and heavy. When they first started showing up, she says she would drive them over to Trulee. 

“And then more came and more and more and it just got to the point where we had to call the senior citizen home and they became a daily visitor at our house,” Schwimmer said. 

A director at Trulee Evanston told WGN News that some Amazon packages for residents do make it to their address. 

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To help make sure they all get to them, Jessica Natale, the director of community engagement for Trulee Evanston, says they’ve sent amazon their GPS coordinates along with the entire apartment listing and resident roster so they add each individual apartment as its own address separately. 

“We have spoken to multiple different people from Amazon that have been looking into this, they have even sent someone out from “Field Quality Assurance” to help figure out what was causing this problem, Natale added. “We communicate with them every time packages are delivered incorrectly, and they continue to say they are looking into it and don’t understand why it is happening either.”

Schwimmer says there’s a sign up at her door asking drivers not to leave packages addressed to 1815 Norwood Court, but that hasn’t helped. The delivery mix has also led to other unexpected visitors. 

“I’ve actually had an adult child of a Trulee resident to retrieve his parents’ package,” she said. “That kind of freaked me out a little bit.”