Nearly killed for $10 trip
Rider demanded fare back, fired after threat to call cops
A 63-year-old cabbie shot and wounded in the neck in Brooklyn was defending himself from a passenger demanding his $10 fare back, shocked relatives said Sunday.
The trouble began after Igbal Perviaz, 63, collected the $10 fare in his green cab on his way to drop his passengers off in East Williamsburg just after midnight Friday.
“People are crazy nowadays — like somebody’s life isn’t worth $10,” the victim’s daughter Samra Perviaz, 33, said Sunday “Never anything like that happened. And it was just over $10.”
Perviaz, an immigrant from Pakistan who lives in South Ozone Park, Queens, picked up a woman who had called into the dispatch center. He was on his wayy to her destination when she asked him to pull over and pick up a man, according to the cabbie’s family.
When they approached their destination, the man asked for the fare back, but Perviaz refused. The shooter tried to grab his phone but it was tangled in cords.
“He tried to snatch the phone and he couldn’t get it. He got tangled up because it was charging,” Samra said.
“Myy dad, he ggoes, ‘You know what, I’m gonna call the cops on you.’ ”
That’s when the male passenger pulled out a gun and shot Perviaz near Varet and Bogart Sts., grazing him in the neck, the bullet ricocheting and hitting him again in the head, Samra said. The couple ran off empty-handed and had not been caught.
Medics took the cabbie to Kings County Hospital in stable condition. He was con
tinuing to recover at home.
“He was bleeding a lot,” Samra said. “If [the bullet] was like one quarter of an inch further, anything could have happened.”
Perviaz, the father of seven children and grandfather of 10, told his family that after more than two decades driv
ing cabs, he was too scared to go back to work.
“He’s like, ‘I don’t think I can drive,’ ” said Samra. “He’s like, ‘I’m shocked ’cause it happened, because I’ve been driving for 25, 26, years.’ He’s like, ‘I don’t understand, how could someone do something to this extent? It’s crazy.’ ”