Shark Weak: Thief Caught & 'Miss Helen' Returned To San Antonio Aquarium

This past Saturday a 16-inch female horn shark was stolen from the San Antonio aquarium. Yesterday she was returned, weak but alive, to a cheering staff after her ‘kidnappers’ were caught.

If you’re on the toilet or pretending to work you can ready my breakdown and/or watch the heist take place in the back, right corner of the footage below.

- 00:18 – A man starts to scoop around in the interactive tide pool as a woman holding an infant keeps watch.

- 00:39 – The man gets ‘Miss Helen’ in a smell net, shoves her under his shirt & dips out as an accomplice in a cut-off tee, who looks like he’d for sure steal fish, hops up from the chairs on the right to follow with blankets. (Not seen: while out of view they find a bucket in a filter room & dump its contents in a tank so they can put Miss H. in it. The contents were bleach for cleaning aquarium instruments & it harmed the other creatures.)

- 01:25 – The accomplice returns with the shark in the blanket-covered bucket & nestles the bundle into the baby carriage. The group then exists the aquarium, probably with raging shark-stealing-excitement-boners.

According to Leon Valley Police Chief Joseph Salvaggio:

“When we got into the garage and into the house it looked like almost a mock up of here. He had a lot of different marine animals in the home, very much knew what he was doing. Kept that animal alive and was able to to continue to see the animal thrive which was pretty shocking to all of us. So luckily the thief was a somebody who knew what he was doing. Luckily for the shark and for the aquarium here we were able to get that animal back in one piece.”

I get that collecting things can be neat ::glances at wide array of Philadelphia parking tickets on dresser:: & sharks are cool, but who does that? And what friends would go along with that? A guy could smuggle me a 10lb ziplock bag of warm Red Lobster Cheddar Bay Biscuits & I’m still not wasting my Saturday to help him steal a shark for his mini Sea World garage. And Miss Helen didn’t deserve that. Hope she’s getting extra special treatment back in her home.