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 took more than 3,000 pounds of frozen snow crab from the back of his trailer Tuesday morning in Southwest Philadelphia, according to the Philadelphia Police Department.
The driver told police he parked along the 3400 block of Island Avenue shortly before 2 a.m. to sleep before completing a delivery to the seafood wholesaler Ocean Kingdom at 3601 Island Ave. later that morning.
Stirred awake at 3:34 a.m. by movement in the back of his trailer, the driver told police, he exited his truck and walked around to the back, finding six men removing boxes of frozen seafood. The crab crooks managed to claw two pallets, each holding 50 boxes of frozen snow crab for a total of 1.5 tons, into a gray Ford F-150 truck and a gray Dodge Caravan minivan, police said. The seafood bandits left the other cargo in the trailer.
When the driver exited his truck, he told police, one of the burglars chased him down the street. The offenders then fled in the F-150 and Caravan.
Investigators recovered evidence from the scene and were canvassing the area for surveillance footage as of Tuesday afternoon, Police Capt. Joseph Busa said. No arrests have been made.
Other large cargo thefts involving frozen food stolen from tractor-trailers at night have been reported in recent years. Tuesday’s smash-and-crab follows two other high-profile trailer robberies, both with a 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 in which robbers made off with half a pallet of Black Angus beef ribs.
The recent heists are “all concerning, but right now it’s really too early to tell if it’s connected to anything,” Busa said of Tuesday’s crab robbery.
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.
