Shocking video footage from inside a Lyft vehicle shows a shirtless passenger savagely beating the driver after he was unable to drive faster.
The footage was captured by a dashcam camera mounted in the driver Eduardo Madiedo’s vehicle.
It shows a middle-aged man and an older woman entering the car into the backseat. Madiedo drives them from the borough of Queens toward Mount Sinai Hospital in Astoria, near Manhattan.
Shocking video shows shirtless passenger savagely beat Lyft driver after telling him to drive faster to a hospital https://t.co/XazqUB9cHb
— Daily Mail US (@DailyMail) May 28, 2019
As he’s driving, the man lays down and begins moaning before eventually removing his shirt. At one point, he urges Madiedo to drive faster.
“I’m sorry, man, I can’t get in front of the cars that are in front of me,” Madiedo responds.
“Why?” the man quickly said.
“Because it’s blocked,” Madiedo said, motioning. The man then curses, to which Madiedo responds by saying he’ll pull over if the passenger continues being disrespectful.
That’s when the man starts pummeling the driver’s head before leaping into the front and grabbing his shoulders, cursing repeatedly.
The woman tries to get the man to stop, calling him “Georgie.” The passenger ultimately exits the car, followed by the woman. He punches the driver again through the open window, prompting Madiedo to shout: “I didn’t do nothing!”
“The guy seemed, I guess, slightly, maybe deranged or unstable,” Madiedo told WCBS.
He said he was concerned about crashing the vehicle while under assault.
“Something triggered him and he just punched me in the back of the head all of a sudden. It was really unexpected,” he added. “The car was in motion, I guess that was my main concern when it was happening was not to crash the car. When he punched me he knocked my glasses off, I couldn’t really see that well. That was my concern, not to hit anybody else or crash my car and make things worse.”
The driver said the beating made him feel subhuman.
“I almost lost my life, in a flash almost. I just felt like, less than human almost,” the driver told NBC NY.
Police are looking for the assailant, who has not been identified, to question him.
While Lyft has banned him from using the ride-hailing service, Madiedo said he may be finished as a driver after the assault.
“I feel like I have to look for a new job or a new form of income,” he said.
