TACOMA, Wash. — A taxi cab driver was found dead in the street next to his vehicle with its engine running and lights on Sunday morning in southwest Tacoma.

Police said they were investigating the man’s death as a homicide. He worked for King Cab Co. of Fife.

The blue and orange taxi was in the middle of the street in the 3600 block of South Lawrence Street when an officer saw it at 5:22 a.m.

Cash was scattered over the back seat of the cab, but police had found no witnesses.

“There wasn’t anybody around,” Tacoma police spokesman Mark Fulghum told The News Tribune.

The victim’s name and the suspected cause of death were not immediately released. Family members identified him to KING-TV as a 23-year-old immigrant from Somalia.

If confirmed as a homicide, it would be the first of the year in Tacoma.

King Cab officials tell KING-TV that the driver picked up a passenger at 3:26 a.m. outside a Tacoma restaurant.

Then the car’s GPS unit signaled that at about 4 a.m. the taxi stopped a couple of miles away in the middle of the street, where the driver was found dead.

King Cab owners say the taxi was equipped with an emergency call button.

“The emergency button was working, but he did not use, so maybe it happened so fast,” Abdi Ahmed told KING-TV.

Sunday’s incident is the latest in a series of assaults and killings of cab drivers in the region in recent years.

Last May, Yellow Cab driver Frazdag Eltahir was shot multiple times after picking up a passenger near the Emerald Queen Casino. Eltahir survived. The shooter, 31-year-old Charles Howard Ayres Jr., pleaded guilty to first-degree attempted murder and first-degree robbery, and was sentenced to 25 years in prison.

Two years earlier, Yellow Cab driver Palwinder Singh was stabbed after picking up a woman at a 7-Eleven store in Tacoma. Palwinder also survived.

In July 2007, Far West Taxi driver Jagit Singh was murdered and his cab burned in an apparent robbery in SeaTac. Earnest Lenell Collins, who was 18, was sentenced to life in prison.