Thieves nab bourbon from trailer while driver sleeps

With another overnight cargo theft, the City of Brotherly Love hasn’t been kind to sleeping truckers over the past few months.

On Thursday, March 14, Philadelphia police responded to a reported cargo theft in the northeast portion of the city. Officials said the thieves made off with cases of bourbon from the trailer while the driver was asleep in the cab.

“The driver was awakened by the truck shaking,” Captain Jack Ryan of the department’s Northeast Detectives Unit told ABC6.

According to police, the truck driver said he saw two vehicles near the rear of his trailer. When police arrived, the driver of one of those cars attempted to flee the scene – striking a police vehicle in the process. Officials said no officers were hurt but the car got away.

Police were able to recover some of the stolen cargo inside a nearby car during the course of their initial investigation. Officers also recovered stolen seafood – evidence of a separate cargo theft incident likely perpetrated by the same crew.

According to police, the incident was the 36^th cargo theft in Philadelphia so far this year. As of Friday, March 15, no arrests had been made in the case.

The theft continued a trend of crimes in the city dating back to last year. In October, a trucker awoke to find 184 cases of crab clusters – valued at $73,000 – had been stolen from his trailer. Then in November, thieves nabbed 15 boxes of frozen beef from a trailer while the driver was parked overnight. It was valued at $7,660. And in January of this year, thieves made off with an estimated $20,000 worth of meat from a truck in the same area of the city as last week’s theft.

In possibly the most brazen incident over the past year, a crew made off with an estimated two million dimes from a trailer in Northeast Philadelphia last April. In October, four men were charged in connection to the caper. LL