Bronx Native Bob Simon Dies In Fatal Crash

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Courtesy cbsnews.com

“60 Minutes” reporter and Bronx native Bob Simon was killed Wednesday in a horrific car crash on the West Side Highway.

Sources told DNAInfor.com that “the 2010 Lincoln Town Car had just left the 57th Street CBS studio and was traveling southbound on the West Side Highway just before 7 p.m. near the Hudson Yards development when it hit the driver’s side of a black 2003 Mercedes Benz that was stopped at a red light on the highway at West 30th Street.”

Police believe Simon was not wearing a seatbelt at the time of the crash. The 73-uear old newsman suffered injuries to his head and body and was pronounced dead at St. Luke’s Roosevelt Hospital.

Simon joined CBS News in 1967 where he covered student uprisings and had been a ‘60 Minutes’ correspondent since 1996. He was considered a consummate journalist.

Born in the Bronx in 1941, Simon graduated from Brandeis University Phi Beta Kappa with a history degree in 1962.  From 1964 to 1967, Simon served as a US Foreign Service officer and was a Fulbright Scholar in France and a Woodrow Wilson scholar.

Bob Simon won three Peabody Awards and 27 Emmy Awards, including a 2012 Emmy for his report on the world’s only all-black symphony orchestra in Central Africa. Another story about an orchestra in Paraguay, whose poor members constructed their instruments from trash, won him his 27th Emmy.

In May 2011, Mr. Simon addressed students at Bronx Science on US foreign policy with an emphasis on the Middle East and the Arab Spring.

Simon is survived by his wife, Françoise, and daughter, Tanya. Simon and his daughter, a ‘60 Minutes’ producer, collaborated on a piece airing this Sunday on the quest for an Ebola cure.

The circumstances surrounding the fatal crash are still being investigated by police.

 

 

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