The driver, Ganiou Gandonou, was found shortly after 9 p.m. seated inside a black Toyota Camry with stab wounds to his neck and torso, police said. He was taken from the car, which was parked on the Hutchinson River Parkway East, to Jacobi Medical Center, where he died.
Police are looking into whether Gandonou’s death began as a robbery.
Gandonou was a licensed for-hire vehicle driver affiliated with Uber, according to a city database. It is unclear if Gandonou was working at the time of the attack.
An Uber spokesman, Grant Klinzman, called his death “a horribly tragic incident” and said “our hearts go out to the grieving family.”
“We stand ready to work with law enforcement to assist their investigation in any way possible,” Klinzman said in a statement.
In 2017, a 68-year-old Uber driver died after he was hit in the head with a hockey stick by a pedestrian during a dispute in Manhattan, police said. A man was arrested, but the charges were later dropped.
Violence against taxi and livery drivers was once common in New York. In the early 1990s, dozens of livery drivers were killed on the job in a single year and many more were assaulted or robbed.
In 2014, two livery drivers were killed in the Bronx in a month, prompting concerns over driver safety. The New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission requires most taxis and for-hire vehicles to have stickers in back seats reminding passengers that assaulting a driver is punishable by up to 25 years in prison.
Violence and threats are part of the job, said Bhairavi Desai, executive director of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance.
“Knowing how to protect yourself from crime is as critical to a driver as knowing the names of streets and avenues,” Desai said. “It’s a part of their day-to-day life behind the wheel.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.