After USC student’s death, patrons may not be heeding warnings, but ride shares are
Five Points patrons piled out of Harden Street bars to a waiting line of Ubers and Lyfts, stumbling after a raucous Thursday night at the entertainment district popular with University of South Carolina students.
Whether Five Points patrons have changed their approach to ride shares after the death of Samantha Josephson is a mixed bag. Josephson was a USC student whom police say was killed after getting in the car with a man she thought was her Uber driver.
Three students walked in front of Bird Dog around 1:10 a.m. Friday, around the exact time just a week earlier when Josephson was kidnapped. One of them motioned to the sidewalk in front of the bar.
“It was right here?” he asked his friends.
This was the spot where surveillance footage showed Josephson’s last moments in Five Points. When Josephson is brought up, the mood shifts. But otherwise, it looks like a regular Thursday night.
Yet one group that seems to have responded immediately is the drivers themselves.
“I’ve noticed Uber drivers are a little more attentive. They’ll ask you what your name is first.... They’re a little more cautious,” Emilie Razuri, a USC junior, said as she waited in line for Bird Dog early Friday morning.
Some of those patrons approached their Ubers or Lyfts, confirmed their names with the driver and sat in the back seat, as Uber’s safety guidelines advise. Some took USC’s shuttle. Very few of them hailed their Uber or Lyft at Columbia Police Department’s Santee Avenue designated ride share pickup spot. Some just stumbled into their ride share, no questions asked.
One woman yelled at her friends, who all piled into a ride, so she couldn’t fit. A man she was standing with at the curb in front of Lucky’s says, “Hey, ask for their name!” The friend left out of the ride told a man, “I don’t want to Uber alone after everything that’s happened.”
Uber driver Sean McGuiness said when he worked last weekend, there was an “icy feel” around Five Points.
One passenger, a young woman, was talking to him and she broke down crying. She was scared, McGuiness said.
“It was the number one topic on everyone’s lips when I was picking them up,” he said. “And I was basically playing — for lack of a better term — grief counselor all night long.”
He said since the news of Josephson’s death, he and other drivers have taken steps to make sure their riders feel safe and drivers do, too. He is part of a Facebook group of local Uber and Lyft operators in Columbia, and there have been many discussions about safety in the past week, he said.
“Some of the Uber drivers are actually scared for themselves,” McGuiness said. “Some of them are only cracking their windows...A couple of others are getting security cameras installed in their cars.”
A few drivers with vehicles similar to the one Josephson entered last week have stayed away from Five Points, waiting for things to “cool down,” according to McGuiness.
Uber driver Regina Williams is likewise staying off the roads for a bit. She said she did not want to be caught in the crosshairs of heightened racial tensions because the man police accused of killing Josephson is black. Williams, an African American woman, said she was a student at USC when a white nursing student was killed in 1984. The killer was black, and much of student reaction was divided among racial lines.
“I did not want to experience that kind of anxiety again,” Williams said.
However, she said in her month of working for Uber, she has only had positive interactions with students. She sees the riders as her children, she said, and has had to mourn Josephson’s loss. Williams said she felt some guilt over it.
“Had I been there that night, would I have gotten the call? I had to deal with my what-ifs also,” she said.