A 21-year-old Uber driver who was shot in the neck during a robbery in Brooklyn is slowly regaining consciousness, his family says, as police continue to search for the gunman who attacked him inside his own car more than two weeks ago in the Prospect Lefferts Gardens neighborhood. The young driver survived a wound that easily could have killed him, and his relatives are now holding on to each small sign of progress.
The attack happened on July 11, while Dinesh Sarwar was working an Uber ride, police said. According to authorities, a person who was inside the car robbed the young driver, stealing his phone and 500 dollars in cash, and then shot him in the neck before running away from the scene and disappearing into the surrounding streets. What had been an ordinary fare turned in an instant into a near-fatal attack.
Sarwar was left with a devastating injury and an uncertain fight to survive. His family says he only opened his eyes for the first time a few days ago, a small and hard-won sign of improvement after the shooting. Doctors have warned that he still faces a long and difficult road to recovery, and that his healing will take time even as his condition slowly begins to move in the right direction.
For his relatives, the fact that he is alive at all feels like a second chance at life. "He's a child. He's only 21 years old. God gave him a second life," his brother said, describing the horror of an attack aimed directly at the neck. "If he shoots you in your head, in your neck, there's only one thing he wants, and that is to kill you." The family has been keeping vigil at his bedside as he fights to recover.
Investigators do have one significant piece of evidence to work with. The suspect was captured on the dash camera mounted inside the Uber, giving police a recorded look at the person they say robbed and shot Sarwar during the ride. Detectives have been working to identify the gunman from that footage and from other leads as they try to track down the person responsible for the shooting.
More than two weeks after the shooting in Prospect Lefferts Gardens, the gunman remains at large and the search for him continues, police said. Sarwar's family, meanwhile, is clinging to every small sign of improvement as the young driver begins what his doctors describe as a slow and painful recovery from a wound that came within inches of taking his life on the job.