Smash and crab: 1.5 tons of frozen snow crab stolen from tractor-trailer in Southwest Philadelphia
The crab crooks stole from the trailer as the truck driver slept in the front of the truck.
While a commercial truck driver was sleeping in the front of his truck, six men robbed the back of his trailer of more than 3,000 pounds of frozen snow crab in Southwest Philadelphia Tuesday morning, according to the Philadelphia Police Department.
The driver said he was asleep inside his semitruck when he heard movement outside the vehicle a little before 4:57 a.m. on the 3400 block of Island Avenue, the driver reported to the police.
Stirred awake, the driver looked to the back of his truck and saw six men removing boxes of frozen seafood from the trailer. The crab crooks managed to claw two pallets, each containing 50 boxes of frozen snow crab weighing 1.5 tons, into a gray Ford F-150 truck and a gray Dodge Caravan minivan, police said. The seafood bandits left all other cargo in the trailer.
When the driver exited his truck, he told police that one of the burglars chased him down the street. The offenders then fled the scene in the F-150 and Caravan.
Large cargo thefts involving frozen food stolen from tractor-trailers at night are on the rise in recent years. Tuesday’s smash and crab follows two other high-profile trailer robberies with similar modus operandi: an October heist of $40,000 worth of frozen ground beef from a trailer in Northeast Philly and September’s robbery in South Philadelphia where robbers made off with half a pallet of Black Angus beef ribs.
In June, a Philadelphia man was sentenced to nearly eight years in prison in relation to cargo thefts in 2023 that had a total estimated value of more than $1.5 million. Some of those cargo thefts included hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of frozen crab legs.
Staff writer Robert Moran contributed to this article.
