A snow crab heist in Southwest Philadelphia sent a truck driver running for safety early Tuesday morning after six men emptied two pallets of frozen crab from his trailer while he slept in the cab.
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The driver, Marty Muriuki, had parked on Island Avenue near Philadelphia International Airport and was napping while he waited to drop the load at a nearby seafood wholesaler, according to Captain Joseph Busa, commander of the Philadelphia Police Department’s Southwest Detective Division. Noise from the back of the truck woke him up. When he looked out, six masked men were pulling boxes of snow crab out of the trailer and loading them into a pickup.
Muriuki got out and confronted them. He told 6abc he yelled for them to stop because he did not want to lose his job. One of the men answered with an offer. “One guy said, ‘We’ll pay you,'” Muriuki recalled. Then another man charged at him, and he ran down the street to a nearby hotel to get away.
Police say the crew drove off in at least two vehicles, a gray Ford F-150 and a gray Dodge Caravan minivan. They took two pallets holding 50 boxes each, with every box weighing about 30 pounds. That adds up to 3,000 pounds of crab, a ton and a half of seafood. The thieves left the rest of the cargo on the truck and took only the crab.
No injuries or arrests have been reported, and Southwest Detectives are still investigating. Busa told reporters it is too early to say whether the snow crab heist is connected to other cargo thefts in the city. Police have not released a dollar value for the stolen seafood.
Tuesday’s snow crab heist is the latest in a long run of food cargo thefts in Philadelphia. Thieves keep targeting parked tractor trailers loaded with high value frozen food, usually overnight while drivers sleep up front. Earlier this month, someone took about $40,000 worth of frozen ground beef from a trailer in Northeast Philadelphia. In September, robbers in South Philadelphia got away with half a pallet of Black Angus beef ribs.
Crab has been a repeat target. In October 2023, thieves hauled 184 cases of crab clusters worth about $73,000 off a truck on Germantown Avenue. In April 2024, about a dozen people assaulted a driver in a Walmart parking lot on Byberry Road in Northeast Philly and made off with roughly $30,000 worth of snow crab. That September, six men took three pallets of crab meat worth at least $42,000 from a truck on Packer Avenue in South Philly while the driver slept inside.
The problem has grown fast. Cargo thefts in Philadelphia more than doubled from 2021 to 2022, and the city recorded 257 of them in 2023. In 2024, New Jersey State Police arrested four Philadelphia men they said had been stealing meat, alcohol and seafood from parked trailers at New Jersey Turnpike service areas, an investigation police named Operation Beef Bandit. Philadelphia police did not tie those arrests to the thefts inside the city at the time.
