Man fatally stabbed after hopping out of cab to see if favorite Queens taco spot open

An immigrant construction worker was stabbed to death on a Queens street after hopping out of the cab he was sharing with his girlfriend to see if his favorite taco spot was open, devastated relatives said Sunday.

Cops were called about 3 a.m. Saturday to New York-Presbyterian Hospital Queens, where Maurico Bravo Quinonez, 29, died after arriving by private means. Investigators soon determined he had been stabbed multiple times all over his body near 31st Ave. and 92nd St. in Jackson Heights.

Quinonez’s brother, Anival Bravo, 32, said the victim and his girlfriend were headed to her home when they stopped to get tacos, but the shop appeared to be closed.

Quinonez got out of the cab to make sure and was confronted on the street. The girlfriend wanted to get out and help, but the frightened taxi driver locked the doors of his cab and drove her home instead, Bravo said. She called some of her friends in the area to help and found out soon after that he’d been stabbed.

Bravo said he couldn’t fathom who would have wanted to kill his brother.

“I have no idea,” he told the Daily News. “I just know that the detectives told us that it was gang-related. I’m like, ‘How’s it gonna be a gang, other than they mistook them and they chased them all the way over here?’”

Bravo was joined by a group of family members at a makeshift memorial for Quinonez Sunday at the scene of the slaying.

“He liked party, dance, cumbia, stuff like that,” Bravo said. “He was funny. We used to make fun of each other, me and him. We used to make jokes. Practically we were the clowns of the family.”

“We used to see the family quiet, we used to make them laugh, just make them laugh,” he added. “Right now I got no one to laugh with.”

Quinonez was about 5 when he and relatives immigrated to the U.S. from Mexico, settling in Sunnyside, where the family still lives. He dropped out of school at about 16 and started doing construction work for his uncle before going solo.

The victim planned to one day start his own construction company “so he can hire people and give a little help to his friends or whoever needed work,” Bravo said.

Cops have made no arrests.

“Eventually they are gonna get him, and things are gonna get right,” Bravo predicted.

Quinonez’s death marks the second homicide this year in the 115th Precinct, which saw four slayings in all of 2023, NYPD stats show.