Last Saturday, a 33-year-old Warren man by the name of Jonte Davis was taken far too soon while simply just doing his job. Is this what society has come to these days? Can a mailman driving through the streets of Warren in a U.S. Postal van not be safe?

Davis was found around 1:44 p.m. March 2 after Warren city police officers responded to calls of shots fired, according to a police report. Davis was found inside of his U.S. Postal van with a gunshot wound.

Officers and EMTs performed life-saving measures before Davis was transported to Trumbull Regional Medical Center, where he died from his wounds, according to a Warren police news release.

No one was in custody at the time of writing this column, but the Mahoning Valley Crisis Response Team had served a search warrant at 429 Maryland Ave. NE the evening Davis was killed and took a few people to the Warren Police Department, according to the news release.

This deplorable act of violence took the life of a man who has been described by family as someone who “never bothered a living soul,” a “good man” and a “father with multiple children.”

But this isn’t the first time that mail carriers have been attacked throughout the Mahoning Valley, as there were two separate documented robberies in Youngstown during 2023.

In the middle of December, a U.S. mail carrier was robbed of his arrow key while delivering in the 1700 block of Kensington Avenue on the North Side. According to the Youngstown police report of the incident, the robbers were specifically targeting the mailman for the key, which is used by U.S. Postal Service employees to access mail collection boxes and other types of mail drop-offs, according to the website of the U.S. Postal Service inspector general.

A U.S. Postal Service worker was also robbed while delivering mail in the 400 block of North Osborne Avenue on the West Side in early 2023 and, again, he was targeted for his arrow key.

Given these two very similar attacks in Youngstown, and the most recent slaying in Warren, something simply must be done to protect U.S. Postal workers in the Mahoning Valley. These are the types of events that make us stand up and call for action. If we can’t come up with a plan of action to protect the simplest of life’s endeavors, what can we do?

Back in December, the Youngstown Police Department warned package delivery people to “be on alert” and suggested always being “aware of your surroundings, know the address and its location before heading there, drive away and avoid areas that appear abandoned and / or poorly lit, never walk behind a dark building or go to a door out-of-view of your vehicle or the street, park in areas that are well-lit, have a flashlight handy, do not carry large amounts of cash, pay attention to vehicles that may be following you and do not allow a ‘customer’ to redirect you to a place other than the original delivery location.”

Is advising our delivery workers to “be on alert” and always be “aware of your surroundings” really all we can do? We must do more, we must be able to protect them daily as they deliver to every part of our beautiful Valley; we owe them that much.

So as we move forward, and mourn the loss of a man who meant so much to his family, I implore area leaders to address the situation at hand and come up with solutions. If we cannot protect the mailmen and women who walk our streets daily, who can we protect? Who is truly safe from destructive acts of violence similar to the one that took place on March 2?

Do you have an interesting story idea? Contact Greg Macafee at gmacafee@tribtoday.com or follow him on Twitter @greg_macafee.

Greg Macafee, Tribune Chronicle / Vindicator editor