Robbers hold up UPS truck in D.C.

Holiday gifts may have already been delivered to their destinations, but that didn’t stop a pair of robbers from holding up a UPS driver in Southeast D.C. on Wednesday and hoisting packages from the back of the driver’s van.

It’s the second such robbery of a delivery driver in the area in two weeks and while it is “premature” to determine whether the two are related, police are looking into the possibility, Metropolitan Police Department spokesman Officer Araz Alali said.

Wednesday’s robbery occurred around noon along Southern Avenue near 42nd Street in Southeast. Two men with masks and a gun held up the UPS employee, making the driver lay down in the truck while they backed a white cargo van to the rear of the UPS truck. The men then loaded a “substantial amount” of packages into the back of the cargo van, Officer Alali said.

The men made the UPS employee drive the delivery truck a few blocks away, to Alabama Avenue and Reed Street Southeast and then left.

A FedEx driver was robbed on Dec. 23 by three men about a mile from the site of Wednesday’s robbery. In that robbery, on Highwood Drive in Southeast, the men ordered a delivery driver to hand over the keys to his truck and stole an unknown number of packages from the truck, then fled in a taxi cab.

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