Andrew H. Walker/Getty Images60 Minutes has lost a member of the family.
Veteran CBS News journalist Bob Simon was killed in a car crash Wednesday night in New York City. He was 73.
E! News confirms that Simon was a passenger in a Lincoln Town Car livery cab that rear-ended a Mercedes-Benz and then hit a median while going south on 12th Avenue at W. 30th Street. Emergency responders arrived at the scene and assessed that he had injuries to the head and torso; he was pronounced dead at nearby St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital. The 44-year-old driver of the Town Car was hospitalized at Bellevue in stable condition, while the driver of the Mercedes was uninjured, according to the NYPD. No arrests were made and the accident is under investigation.
CBS Evening News anchor Scott Pelley made the announcement on air in a special report. "One of the great writers of a generation has passed. Bob Simon was a journalist of extraordinary courage," he also tweeted.
Simon, who joined 60 Minutes in 1996 and was most recently the long-running show's senior foreign correspondent, won 27 Emmys and was a four-time Peabody Award winner. Over the course of his five-decade career he reported from all over world, serving as a war correspondent for CBS News during Vietnam and covering conflicts in Africa, the Middle East, Northern Ireland, the Falkland Islands, the former Yugoslavia and Haiti.
His book Forty Days chronicled the 40 days he and his fellow CBS News teammates spent in an Iraqi prison during the Gulf War in 1991.
Simon's most recent piece for 60 Minutes was a feature on the film Selma, including a sit-down with director Ava DuVernay, that aired this past weekend.
Survivors include his wife, Françoise, and their daughter, Tanya, a producer on 60 Minutes.
Reactions started pouring in from fellow journalists such as Anderson Cooper, Al Roker, Roland Martin, Campbell Brown and David Carr, as well as from high-profile admirers who either knew the man or who, like so many of us, tuned in on a weekly basis:
CBS News correspondent, Bob Simon, 73, killed in a car accident in New York City on the West Side Hiway. What a loss pic.twitter.com/wNFfU2ODo3
? Al Roker (@alroker) February 12, 2015