Veteran “60 Minutes” correspondent and CBS News foreign reporter Bob Simon was killed Wednesday in a car accident in New York City, CBS News reported.
The New York Police Department said the accident occurred around 6:45 p.m. at 30th street and 12th avenue when the Lincoln Town Car in which Simon was riding struck the driver's side of a 2003 Mercedes, which was stopped at a red light and then slammed into metal barriers separating the two traffic lanes.
“He swerved into me,” the Mercedes driver told The New York Post. “He hit me and he looked like he lost control of the car.”
Simon suffered injuries to his head and torso, police said. The town car's 44-year-old driver, who suffered injuries to his legs and arms, was in stable condition, the NYPD said. The Mercedes' driver was uninjured.
Simon and the town car's driver were taken to Saint Luke's Roosevelt Hospital, where Simon was pronounced dead.
No arrests were made in the accident, which remained under investigation by the NYPD Wednesday night.
Simon covered stories including the Vietnam War and the Oscar-nominated movie "Selma" in a career spanning five decades. CBS says Simon was among a handful of elite journalists who've covered most major overseas conflicts and news stories since the late 1960s.
Simon had been contributing to "60 Minutes" on a regular basis since 1996. He also was a correspondent for "60 Minutes II."
Anderson Cooper, who does occasional stories for "60 Minutes," was near tears when talking about Simon's death. Cooper said when Simon presented a story, "you knew it was going to be something special."
"I dreamed of being, and still hope to be, a quarter of the writer that Bob Simon is and has been," the CNN anchor said. "... Bob Simon was a legend, in my opinion. He was someone I was intimidated by."
Simon joined CBS News in 1967 as a reporter and assignment editor. He started out covering campus unrest and inner-city riots, CBS said. He worked at CBS' Tel Aviv bureau from 1977 to 1981 and in Washington as its U.S. State Department correspondent.
Simon's war reporting career began in Vietnam. He was on one of the last helicopters out of Saigon when the U.S. withdrew from the war-torn country in 1975.
Simon was captured by Iraqi forces near the Saudi-Kuwait border while reporting on the Gulf War in January 1991. Simon and three other members of the CBS news team spent 40 days in Iraqi prisons. Simon wrote about his experience in his book, "Forty Days." Simon returned to Baghdad in January 1993 to cover the American bombing of Iraq.
Over his career, Simon collected four Peabody awards and 27 Emmy awards, including one for his report on the world's only all-black symphony in Central Africa in 2012 and another about an orchestra in Paraguay whose poor members constructed instruments from the trash.
Simon was born May 29, 1941, in the Bronx. He graduated from Brandeis University in 1962 with a degree in history. He and his wife have a daughter, who is a producer for "60 Minutes" in New York.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
