What started out as a regular workday for Opp postal worker Kristin Davis, ended with her feeling the need to call the cops for a welfare check.

On Tues., April 2, Davis was on her regular route when she noticed that an elderly lady hadn’t checked her mail.

“This particular lady has no family or friends,” Davis said. “She usually is always there when we get there to drop off the mail, or we see her come to the mailbox when we leave. I am off on Mondays, so when I went to drop off her mail, I noticed that she had not picked up her Monday mail, which was odd. Her vehicle was still there so I just thought to myself, ‘Well on Mondays a lot of the mail is heavier and sometimes it may run at a different time, so she may have checked it too early and that is why the mail is still in the box.’ ”

On that Wednesday, Davis noticed that the mail was still in the mailbox and the vehicle was still in the driveway.

“I know that she has a big dog,” Davis said. “And she takes it with her every where, because I have seen her at the grocery store and at gas stations and the dog is always in the car with her. I knew that if I went up to the door and the dog was inside then something was wrong, because she wouldn’t just leave the dog alone. I decided to walk up to the door and knock on it, just to check and when I knocked on the door, the dog started going crazy. I knew that something had to be wrong because she takes that dog with her everywhere.”

Davis then called the police and told her everything that had happened.

“I just told them that she was an elderly lady and that I thought that there was something wrong,” Davis said. “I just wanted them to do a welfare check. She is at the end of my route, so I decided to finish it off and then get in my personal vehicle and drive back over there. When I got there, a police officer was standing at the door. He was already knocking and calling for her, so I walked up to him and told him that I was the one that called.”

After investigating a little further, the police officer decided to call an investigator and an ambulance.

“He told me that he could tell that the lady couldn’t have left the house with the way a lock was set up on the door,” Davis said. “So all of the people are there now and the dog is still going crazy, and they can’t get in the door. I started feeling like I was getting in the way, so I decided to go home. They told me that they couldn’t really enter unless they had a reason to believe that she was still in there, so they used the dog and the lock as enough reason to go in.”

When Davis was driving home, she got a call from the officer saying that they found the elderly lady.

“They called me and told me that they had found her in the bathroom and that she had fallen,” Davis said. “He told me that all that they could tell me was that she was alive. They transported her by ambulance, but she didn’t stay in the hospital very long. She had to have been in the bathroom for at least a couple of days.”

Davis said that she has been on the same route in Opp for eight years and nothing like that has ever happened.

“We usually get to know the people that we deliver mail to because we are always on the route,” Davis said. “Since I did know that something was a little off, I was worried that something like that had happened.”

She said that the U.S. Postal Service encourages mail carriers to keep an eye on certain things on their routes.

“We are usually told to watch for mail build up and things like that,” Davis said. “I mean, I know that some people forget to check their mail, but this lady never forgot.”