A former United States Postal Service Employee has been sentenced to six months in prison for hiding 44,900 pieces of mail in his dead mother's basement to "speed up his route," Fox News reported.

The Kentucky mailman is slated to complete six months of house arrest after his stint in prison gets completed.

William "Brent" Morse, 34, has also been ordered to pay $14,808.01 for losses suffered by residents and a local bank and for losses to two businesses which attempted to mail commercial circulars.

"He wanted to speed up his route," city police Capt. Craig Patterson, told The Courier-Journal. "I think he was lazy."

From March 2011 until March 30, 2013, Morse used his deceased mother's home and a rented storage facility in Dawson Springs to destroy at least 1,000 pieces of mail and store another 44,900 pieces.

He pleaded guilty back in December and was sentenced on Tuesday.

The recovered mail, a majority of which was meant to be delivered for Dawson Springs, has since been mailed.

"His lawyer told the paper that his client was going through a divorce and had to pick up his kids during the day," according to Fox News.

It's not that he was stealing anything from it," Patrick Bouldin, the federal public defender, told the paper. He told The Courier-Journal that the missing mail only represented a fraction of the 1.2 million pieces of mail he'd deliver.

The owner of the storage business discovered the U.S. Postal Service crates when he found the door of the facility ajar, Valdes said. The police and the postmaster were then immediately contacted.

However, Patterson said police first found the mail in the mother's house, and that Morse initially insisted that it was the only mail he had stashed, Fox News reported.

Sue Brennan, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Postal Service, said, "We take the sanctity of the U.S. mail very seriously, and the Postal Inspection Service and the Office of Inspector General prosecute to the fullest extent of the law anyone who violates that trust."