ST. LOUIS • Rather than simply grumble to himself or complain to others, a St. Louis man aggrieved by a company's failure to hire him took another approach.

Jevons Brown packaged up cat feces and sent it through the mail.

Brown, 58, was sentenced Friday to two years of probation after pleading guilty in August to a misdemeanor charge of mailing injurious articles.

The plea says Brown, a veteran, became frustrated with his lack of employment opportunities and lashed out at employees of companies that failed to hire him.

U.S. Postal Inspection Service spokesman Dan Taylor said that investigators tracked 20 similar packages to Brown.

“This is not a victimless crime,” Assistant U.S. Attorney John Bodenhausen said in court Friday, later explaining that he meant postal workers and the people whose mail was adjacent to Brown's packages, in addition to the employees that received it.

Both Bodenhausen and Sean Vicente, Brown's public defender, agreed that probation was an appropriate sentence, saying Brown had recently found a job and had almost no criminal history.

Federal sentencing guidelines recommended probation or up to six months in prison.