PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — For a second time this week, thieves broke into refrigerated cargo trucks parked outside the Food Distribution Center in South Philadelphia. A shipment of tuna valued at thousands of dollars was stolen in the latest incident early Thursday morning.
Police say there have been more than 100 cargo thefts so far this year throughout Philadelphia. The latest theft happened around 3 a.m. along South Lawrence Street near Pattison Avenue.
Officials say the 63-year-old driver of the truck was asleep in the cab when a group of men broke into the vehicle and got away with a skid of tuna with an estimated value of more than $10,000. A security guard at the distribution center alerted the driver.
"Three days earlier on the same block we had another cargo theft approximately around the same time," Philadelphia Police Capt. Robert McKeever told NBC10.
He said they got away with six boxes of salmon with more than $2,000.
McKeever says police are seeing cargo thefts pick up not just in South Philadelphia but across the city, and there is a pattern.
"They are pretty quick, and they definitely know what they are doing," McKeever said. "A lot of the drivers are over-the-road drivers, and I'm sure they have appointment times to get unloaded, so they want to catch up on their sleep. So [the thieves] are hitting early in the morning. It's definitely a trend."
He says it's hard today where they are distributing the food they're stealing.
"We have been reaching out to other jurisdictions to see if they have had similar incidents and we see that they have. We are making progress but it's just a lot."
He says police want truck drivers and security at the food distribution centers to be more vigilant, particularly in the early morning hours.
"We don't want to see anybody get hurt."
