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Livery driver advocate offers $5,000 reward after wave of Uber, Lyft robberies

Evan Simko-Bednarski and Thomas Tracy, New York Daily News on

Published in News & Features

NEW YORK — A New York City livery and taxi driver advocate is offering a $5,000 reward to anyone with information that can help cops make arrests in a string of recent attacks and carjackings among working drivers.

“We are outraged that, in seven days, we have had upwards of six armed robberies,” Fernando Mateo, founder of the New York State Federation of Taxi Drivers, said Wednesday. “We are here offering $5,000 to anyone that could give us information regarding these crimes.

“Our drivers go out to work in the morning, and a lot of times they don’t know if they’re going to get back home,” he added.

The six assaults took place between April 4 and April 12, Mateo said, with five incidents in the Bronx and one in Brooklyn.

Police could not immediately confirm the details of two of the Bronx incidents.

The Brooklyn driver, who spoke to the Daily News on the condition that he be identified only by his first name, Juan, said he was brutally attacked in East New York on April 7 by four teenage boys after he stopped to pick up a passenger.

 

“These four kids approached the car to get in — like a regular ride,” he said. “I asked if they knew the name of the person [who had ordered the ride], because it was a female name — it could have been [one of] their moms.

“They didn’t know the name. Some of them said ‘this isn’t our car,'” Juan said.

The driver said he began looking around for his fare when one of the teens sucker-punched him through his open window.

“I looked to the right, and I got punched,” he said. “They punched me a few times, and somebody came with a gun and said ‘give me everything, give me the money.'”

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