Bob Simon dead: CBS News and 60 Minutes correspondent killed in car crash

Longtime CBS News correspondent Bob Simon has been killed in a car accident in New York, the broadcaster announced.

In a career spanning five decades, Bob Simon, 73, covered many war zones from Vietnam to the former Yugoslavia.

At the end of his stint in Saigon in the 1970s Bob Simon was on one of the last helicopters out of the city, CBS said.

Bob Simon won multiple awards, including 27 Emmys, for his reporting and regularly appeared on the network’s flagship program 60 Minutes.

His last piece, a report about the Oscar-nominated civil rights drama Selma went out on 60 Minutes at the weekend.

“It is a tragedy made worse because we lost him in a car accident, a man who escaped more difficult situations than almost any journalist in modern times,” CBS News Chairman and 60 Minutes executive producer Jeffrey Fagan said.

Bob Simon was a passenger in a hired sedan that hit another car stopped at a traffic light and then slammed into metal barriers separating traffic lanes, police said February 11.

CNN’s Anderson Cooper, who worked with Bob Simon on 60 Minutes said: “Bob was for the last five decades simply one of the best, in my opinion, at getting a story, telling a story, writing a story and making it simply unforgettable.”