New York Metropolis cabbies paid tribute to one in all their very own Sunday on the Harlem block the place a driver died on the wheel throughout a July warmth wave. The solemn memorial got here two days after their fundraising marketing campaign shipped his stays to his household in Ivory Coast.
Richard Coulibaly, a taxi driver for almost 20 years, was discovered lifeless on July 2 inside his parked cab on Frederick Douglass Boulevard, police stated. The grim discovery close to West 116th Road set off a winding social media marketing campaign by fellow Ivorians and the New York Taxi Employees Alliance to find kin of a person who had few buddies and lived alone in a rented room in Harlem.
The search, which The Metropolis Reporter detailed Friday, finally led to the 73-year-old driver’s family members in Ivory Coast, the West African nation that Coulibaly left for america in 1996.
“I’m very grateful for every part they did,” his daughter, Anne Marie Tatiana, 38, advised The Metropolis Reporter.
Taxi Employees Alliance officers stated Coulibaly’s stays arrived within the Ivorian metropolis of Abidjan on Sunday afternoon, following a cease in Brussels. The journey was funded with donations to an on-line fundraising marketing campaign established by the union.
“He had shut buddies, like one or two individuals, however he’s not somebody who’ve like 50, 60 individuals, no,” added Tatiana, the second of Coulibaly’s 4 kids. “When he’s your buddy, he’s your buddy, and individuals who knew him, they know that’s how he’s.”
A small crowd of drivers on Sunday laid roses on Frederick Douglass Boulevard in tribute to Coulibaly. Amongst them had been some Ivorian cabbies, who make up simply over a half-percent of the roughly 180,000 drivers licensed by the New York Metropolis Taxi & Limousine Fee.
MORE: He Died in His NYC Taxi in a Warmth Wave. Cabbies Are Returning His Physique to Ivory Coast.
Bhairavi Desai, government director of the Taxi Employees Alliance, stated Coulibaly’s solitary existence spent removed from household was one which resonated strongly with the largely immigrant driver workforce.
“Years in the past, I had a driver at LaGuardia Airport say to me, ‘U.S.A. stands for you stand alone,’” Desai stated. “There’s a actual feeling of when you’re on this nation, you might be simply discarded and spend each second making an attempt to show why you shouldn’t be, and that’s quite a lot of isolation.”
She stated many immigrant drivers are in an identical place to Coulibaly, who shut buddy Aboubacar Diakité, a Harlem small enterprise proprietor, beforehand described as “working, working, working, each day working.”
“That lifetime of isolation and the lifetime of simply work, work, work, it’s the lifetime of too lots of our immigrant brothers and sisters,” Desai stated.
The profitable seek for Coulibaly’s kin in Ivory Coast will allow him to be laid to relaxation in his household’s village, avoiding the prospect of an nameless burial in New York Metropolis.
“Earlier than we positioned the household, we had been in fixed contact with the [city chief] health worker’s workplace to allow them to know, ‘Please don’t ship the physique to potter’s area, there’s a household, we all know they’re going to seek out them and they’ll need an honorable, correct burial for his or her member of the family,’” Desai stated.
Mouhamadou Aliya, a 54-year-old taxi driver from Ivory Coast who didn’t know Coulibaly, stated he was moved by the response to his countryman’s demise, whose trigger stays below investigation. The 73-year-old man died throughout a warmth wave marked by the first 100-degree day in New York Metropolis in additional than a decade.
Solely 3% of TLC drivers are 70 or older, in accordance with TLC knowledge.
“It’s very unhappy, it’s powerful, nobody needs to finish like this,” Aliya stated. “However on the finish of the day, we nonetheless need to be grateful to be right here in America, as a result of not having no one, we’re nonetheless right here to honor him as a result of the nation has an enormous coronary heart.”
MORE: The Metropolis Reporter’s protection of the New York taxi trade.
Coulibaly’s daughter described him as a hardworking and “very personal” man who was centered on making a dwelling. His youthful brother Christophe beforehand advised The Metropolis Reporter he had not been conscious Richard labored as a cabbie till these from New York advised him.
“Generally we’d be speaking and he’d be like, ‘Hey, I’ve to go, I’ll name you later,’ and that’s it,” Tatiana stated of her father. “He was a really hardworking man, he was a really simple man.”
She added that Coulibaly would have been shocked {that a} memorial was held in public for somebody with a “very tight circle” of buddies.
“Individuals who knew him, they liked him,” she stated. “In order that’s the best way to pay the respect to him.”
