‘Some sort of connection’: Police investigating whether three Philly slayings tied to towing industry are related

Philadelphia police are investigating whether the separate slayings of three men, all who worked in the city’s towing industry, are connected, authorities said this week.

Two of the men, who were shot and killed in December and January respectively, worked as truck operators for the Jenkintown-based company 448 Towing and Recovery, according to police.

The other man, who was shot and killed in November, is connected to a different towing company and worked as a wreck spotter.

Investigators began looking at a possible connection between the killings after the shooting death of 25-year-old Aaron Whitfield Jr. on Sunday, according to Lt. Thomas Walsh of the department’s homicide unit.

“On the surface, there’s obviously some sort of connection,” Walsh said.

Whitfield was in a tow truck with his girlfriend outside of a North Philadelphia smoke shop near Bustleton Avenue and Knorr Street that evening when two men pulled up in another vehicle. They fired at least a dozen shots at the truck before speeding off.

Whitfield died at the scene, while the woman was hospitalized with gunshot wounds to the leg.

The shooting came after another 448 Towing and Recovery driver, David Garcia-Morales, was shot on Dec. 22 while in a tow truck on the 4200 block of Torresdale Avenue, according to police.

Police arrived to find Morales, 20, had been struck multiple times. They rushed him to a nearby hospital, where he died from his injuries on Dec. 26.

While Walsh could not conclusively say whether investigators believe the killings were carried out by the same person or by multiple individuals, he noted that two different vehicles had been used in the crimes.

One of those vehicles, a silver Honda Accord used in the shooting of Whitfield, was recovered earlier this week after police found it abandoned in West Philadelphia, Walsh said.

Meanwhile, police are investigating whether the shooting death of 26-year-old Aaron Smith-Sims in November may also be connected to the killings of Whitfield and Garcia-Morales.

Smith-Sims, who Walsh said was connected to a different towing company, died after he was shot multiple times on the 2700 block of North Hicks Street in North Philadelphia the morning of Nov. 23.

Investigators are now looking to question the owners of both towing companies involved, according to Walsh.

So far, they have failed to make contact with the owner of 448 Towing and Recovery.

“Obviously the victims’ families are cooperating,” Walsh said. “They’re supplying all the information that they have.”

Philadelphia’s towing industry can appear like something out of the Wild West, with operators fiercely competing to arrive first at car wrecks and secure the business involved with towing or impounding vehicles.

Police began imposing some order on the process in 2007, introducing a rotational system in which responding officers cycle through a list of licensed towing operators to dispatch to accident scenes.

But tow operators often skirt that system, employing wreck spotters — those like Smith-Sims — to roam the city and listen to police scanners for accidents, convincing those involved to use their service before officers arrive.

The predatory nature of the industry and, in some cases, its historic ties to organized crime make it rife with exploitative business practices and even criminal activity.

But Walsh cautioned the public against jumping to conspiracy theories about the killings, which have proliferated on social media in the days after Whitfield’s death and the news of a possible connection between the murders.

Those suspicions aren’t entirely unwarranted.

In 2017, several employees who worked for the Philadelphia towing company A. Bob’s Towing were shot within 24 hours of one another — two of them fatally.

Police and federal investigators later arrested Ernest Pressley, 42, a contract killer who was sentenced to life in prison after pleading guilty to killing six people between 2016 and 2019.

Pressley admitted to accepting payment in exchange for killing one of the towing employees, 28-year-old Khayyan Fruster, who had been preparing to testify as a witness in an assault trial.

Pressley shot Fruster in his tow truck on the 6600 block of Hegerman Street, killing him and injuring one of his coworkers.

And in an effort to mask the killing — and to make it appear as if it had been the result of a feud between towing operators — Pressley earlier shot and killed one of Fruster’s coworkers at A. Bob’s Towing at random, according to prosecutors.