NEW YORK (1010 WINS) -- An Uber driver was shot and killed by an irate gunman outside a Bronx bar on New Year’s Eve, police and an eyewitness said Friday as a taxi drivers union offered a $10,000 reward Friday for info in NYC's first homicide of 2026.
Issa Isac—a 55-year-old married father of four from West Africa who'd been driving in the city for years—was finishing up a 12-hour New Year’s Eve shift and headed to a mosque to pray when he was shot and killed early Thursday.
Isac was not the intended target, according to the New York State Federation of Taxi Drivers (NYSFTD), which held a press conference Friday with an eyewitness who said he saw the shooting and knows the gunman.
“This is a murder. Issa was shot at point-blank range through the side of his driver passenger window,” NYSFTD spokesman Fernando Mateo said.
Isac happened to be driving by the bar at Morris Avenue and the Cross Bronx Expressway in the Mt. Hope section just before 7 a.m. Thursday—right as the crazed gunman started opening fire.
According to the eyewitness—who wore sunglasses and a ski mask to remain anonymous at the press conference—the gunman had walked out of an after-hours bar to discover his car had been damaged in a fender-bender. He then started randomly firing at passing cars, the witness said.
“He was coming in and out of the place, and he saw that somebody had swiped his car, and he just walked out and just started shooting at every car that was going by,” the witness said through a translator.
“According to what [the witness] is telling us, the guy was just upset and started shooting and shot the driver,” Mateo said.
Isac was shot in the head. He was pronounced dead at NYC Health + Hospitals/Jacobi.
The NYSFTD is offering a $10,000 reward for information on the shooter, who fled the scene in a car.
“We believe the shooter is a Dominican immigrant,” Mateo said. “We believe if he hasn’t fled to the Dominican Republic, he was probably very close to fleeing there.”
Anyone with information is asked to call Crime Stoppers at 1-800-577-TIPS.