A ride-share driver was fatally shot and a male passenger injured in the Little Italy neighborhood on Monday night, according to Chicago police.
The 31-year-old male driver had stopped at a red light at the intersection of Roosevelt Road and Blue Island Avenue shortly after 9 p.m. when four men in a silver SUV pulled next to him and someone inside fired shots at the ride-share vehicle, police said.
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The driver suffered multiple gunshot times to the torso and the Chicago Fire Department transported him to Stroger Hospital, where he was pronounced dead at 10:05 p.m., authorities said. The Cook County medical examiner’s office identified him as Milton Pillacela Ayora of Chicago.
The 34-year-old passenger was also transported to Stroger with gunshot wounds to the legs and was in fair condition. No one was in custody and Area 3 detectives are investigating, according to police.
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Maribel Pillacela, sister of the driver, posted a tribute to him on social media early Tuesday. “Only the body dies, the soul remains alive, it moves, for us your memory will remain always in our heart,” she wrote in a Facebook post.
“My heart goes out and my sincere condolences to both victims of this shooting and this horrible murder,” said Andy Thomashow of Justice for App Workers. “Until legislatively, the city of Chicago and the state of Illinois do something about this — and set aside the gun violence side — it has to do with the inability of the ride-share companies to provide appropriate safety to their drivers.”
Thomashow said he stopped driving for Uber after suffering from PTSD from being carjacked at gunpoint by three passengers in August. “I don’t think that the training, I don’t think that the work that’s being done to protect drivers, is anywhere close enough to being what it needs to be. It’s just wrong,” he said.
In August, 20,000 ride-share drivers and delivery workers from Uber, Lyft, DoorDash and Grubhub working in Illinois announced they were joining the national movement led by Justice for App Workers to demand better wages, safer working conditions, an end to unfair account deactivations, health and mental health care benefits, access to bathrooms and union rights.
In December, the Illinois chapter of the movement protested at O’Hare International Airport by refusing to take any rides for two hours during a cold night in the busy holiday season.
