Uber rider recorded himself stabbing his driver to death, sheriff says

Unaware of what the passenger in her back seat was planning to do to her, Uber driver Yolanda Dillion drove him from New Orleans to his motel in the suburbs.

Around 3 p.m. Thursday, Dillion, 54, pulled up to the Travelodge in Harvey, La., expecting to drop off her rider and keep driving. Instead, the stranger in her back seat stabbed her repeatedly, got out of the car and returned to his hotel room, leaving Dillion to bleed to death.

Brandon Jacobs, 29, has been charged with second-degree murder and is accused of killing the 10-year employee at the New Orleans Police Department, who earned extra money by driving for Uber and Uber Eats. At a news conference on Friday, Jefferson Parish Sheriff Joseph Lopinto III repeatedly searched for words to describe a random act of violence that defied reason.

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Jacobs and Dillion were perfect strangers and, as far as investigators know, had never crossed paths until Jacobs used his phone Thursday afternoon to hail an Uber car and Dillion accepted the ride, according to the sheriff.

“His confession basically stated that he woke up yesterday morning and decided he was going to kill someone and decided that that was going to be the day,” Lopinto said.

Jacobs’s lawyer did not respond to a request for comment from The Washington Post on Sunday.

An Uber spokesperson told The Post that the company, which has banned Jacobs from its app, is helping law enforcement with the investigation and have contacted Dillion’s family to offer condolences and support.

“We are extremely disturbed by this senseless attack,” the spokesperson said in an email.

Uber said it was committed to drivers’ safety and highlighted security features the company has created in recent years. Those include an emergency button built into the app that, when activated, sends trip details to 911 dispatchers and a requirement that riders using anonymous payment forms upload images of their government IDs.

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At first, Jacobs planned to hail an Uber ride at the Travelodge where he was staying, go along for the ride to New Orleans and then kill that driver, Lopinto said Friday. Realizing that would leave him in need of a ride back to the motel, he allegedly decided to wait to kill the second driver at the end of the return trip.

“When we asked him specifically, ‘How did you pick her?’ his response was, ‘I didn’t pick her. Uber picked her,’ meaning that she was the random person that picked him up that day,” Lopinto said.

Uber did not respond to a request for comment from The Post late Sunday.

Jacobs allegedly recorded the stabbing on video and later posted it to Facebook. Lopinto described the footage as “horrifying” and said his office worked with the social media company to have it taken down.

After the stabbing, Jacobs got out of the car and “casually” walked to his motel room, leaving the knife at the scene, Lopinto said.

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As law enforcement swarmed the motel to investigate, Jacobs holed up in his room, not yet on detectives’ radar, Lopinto said. Later, after they had identified him as a suspect and were homing in on his room, he emerged to smoke a cigarette.

“He thought we had left,” the sheriff said.

After they arrested him, investigators discovered what the sheriff described as a “companion knife” in his room.

New Orleans Police Department Superintendent Shaun Ferguson described Dillion as quiet and humble — “a little giant” who was beloved in the fiscal budget department where she worked as an analyst. She had been taking care of her ailing mother for several years.

“Truly a lovely person,” Ferguson said, adding that news of her violent death “tore our employees up this morning.”

“It definitely blindsided everyone,” he said.

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Those mourning Dillion’s death included one of New Orleans’s most famous sons — actor Wendell Pierce, who is most known for playing jaded Baltimore homicide detective Bunk Moreland in “The Wire.” Pierce took to Twitter on Friday to urge people to “remember” Dillion, describing her as “my church member for decades, a woman with a heart of gold & a deep love of God.”

Dillion’s mother, Edna, told nola.com that her daughter was an only child and born and raised in New Orleans, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in sociology from Xavier University and a master’s in the same subject from Tulane University.

Dillion was a regular at St. Paul the Apostle Catholic Church, a lector who read scripture at Mass, nola.com reported. Although she didn’t have children of her own, she doted on those at St. Paul; with Christmas approaching, she had gathered dozens of red and green bags, and planned to stuff them with treats and then divvy them out.

“She was fun-loving,” a cousin, Marlene Riley, told the news organization. “She was still a big kid herself.”

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