Beach thief suspect sandbagged by swimmers at Manhattan pier
A member of the Manhattan Beach swimming group took this photo last Wednesday after suspecting the man was stealing from swimmers’ backpacks. The man was arrested on Friday when he again was seen appearing to steal from the swimmers’ backpacks.
For the past 20 years, a group of swimmers have met at the Manhattan Beach pier Wednesday, Friday and Sunday mornings. They run along the hard sand toward Hermosa Beach and swim back to the pier. The nearly 100 swimmers range from 80-year-old Bill Singley, who is training for next week’s Dwight Crum Two-Mile Pier to Pier Swim, to Sue Murray, who is training to swim the English Channel at the end of August.
Two weeks ago, on a Friday, several of the swimmers found phones, and keys missing from the backpacks they leave unattended at the pier. It had never happened before. Then it happened again the following Wednesday.
One member of the group does the run but doesn’t swim. She exercises back at the pier until the swimmers return.
Last Wednesday, she was waiting for the swimmers when she noticed an unfamiliar man drop his backpack next to swimmers’ backpacks.
“Who does that? Just drops his backpack next to other people’s stuff,” she recalled thinking.
She discreetly photographed the man with her phone.
“I walked around in a circle to get a good look at him. I read too many detective novels. I noticed he had a mole on his left side, next to his nose and was wearing a Lakers cap. I didn’t want to scare him off, so I introduced myself and asked if he was there to swim with the group. He was very calm and not at all defensive. He said his name was Joseph, and that he was Egyptian and he liked to swim. Then he invited me to coffee. I said we all go to Starbucks and he was welcome to join us, but he declined.”
On Friday, Singley and John Reeves arrived at the pier too late to swim with the group. Reeves bicycles from his Palos Verdes home to the pier. After the swim, he bicycles to work in El Segundo. Reeves is also training for the Pier to Pier Swim, which he did as a kid, and resumed doing 10 years ago.
Singley and Reeves were standing on top of the pier when they saw a man rifling through the swimmers’ backpacks.
Reeves took a photo of the man.
Singley said he was going down to the sand to investigate.
“If I raise my hand in the air, call the police,” he told Reeves.
The man who had been rifling the backpacks told Singley he was friends with one of the swimmers and named the woman he had asked out to coffee on Wednesday.
Singley waived his hand in the air. The man ran. A Manhattan Beach Police squad car blocked the suspect’s car as he was driving out of the lower pier parking lot.
Murray returned from the swim to find her car key missing from her backpack. The police found the key on the front seat of the suspect’s car, along with a collection of cell phones and other items that appeared to have been stolen from the swimmers.
Yousef Alhariri, 39, of Berkeley, was arrested on charges of grand theft, according to Manhattan Beach public information officer Tim Zins.
“A lovely thing about Manhattan Beach,” said Murray, a London native, “is you can do things like leave an unattended swim bag on the beach. I hope this doesn’t ruin that,” she said.