Family backs cabbie held in sex assault
‘Never had problems like this with women,’ accused man’s wife says
The family of an Ottawa taxi driver accused of sexually assaulting a young female passenger inside his cab early Saturday morning has risen to his defence, claiming the Syrian-Canadian man is a “good, hard-working father” who has not had trouble with the law in the past.
Nidal Zeiti, 52, was to remain in jail until a bail hearing Friday morning. He is charged with sexually assaulting a 20-year-old woman who hailed a cab on Bank Street around 2:30 a.m. Saturday morning.
Police say the woman was driven to a residential neighbourhood near McCarthy and Walkley roads and the driver sexually assaulted her in the back seat of his Blue Line cab.
Coventry Connections, which operates Blue Line and other cabs in Ottawa, has fully co-operated with police and launched its own exhaustive search to help find the suspect.
Earlier this week, police seized a cab after a review of a surveillance footage from a camera inside a taxi.
Coventry began looking at the area that police said the alleged assault took place on Monday.
Twenty cabs were forensically analyzed in a covert operation before the company instructed the final isolated vehicle to go to a location where police were waiting Wednesday.
Zeiti was charged the next day.
“It feels like I’m living in a nightmare and I don’t want to wake up. That’s not my dad,” the daughter of the accused told the Citizen.
The accused’s wife and daughter cried softly during a court hearing Thursday afternoon.
“He’s never had any problems like this with women — never,” said Sana Daod, the accused’s wife.
Court records show Zeiti had a charge of assault stayed against him in 2009. He was accused of assaulting a woman.
The accused taxi driver is described by family as a hardworking father of four children who works long hours at the wheel, swims, sings and loves cooking Arabic dishes in his free time.
They claim he’s a “logical” man who “made sense of the world to his kids.”
The case has not been proved in court and while police have access to a cab’s videotape, it is not clear whether the view of the camera was obstructed during the time in question.
The president of Coventry Connections said drivers are vigorously vetted. They must go through a fiveweek course, and an additional day-long course, both of which discuss sexual harassment, president Hanif Patni said. Drivers must also sign a declaration that they understand the sexual harassment policies.
Patni said the average taxi driver has been working for the company for more than 10 years, but Zeiti has only been employed since March of 2010. He passed a criminal records check but did have a company file, which is only initiated when there are logged issues.
“He did have a file, which means there were issues we were dealing with, but they were not related to customer behaviour or poor driving,” Patni said,
Patni said drivers cannot work for the company if they have a criminal record. Zeiti’s stayed charge, while available to the public, never resulted in a conviction so is not considered a criminal record. But, even if acquitted of the charge currently against him, Zeiti might not be allowed to continue driving cabs.
Now that the driver has been identified by police, city bylaw chief Linda Anderson is drafting a letter notifying Zeiti that his licence is suspended, said Coun. Mark Taylor, who oversees the community and protective services committee.
If a driver is convicted of a crime while on the job, the licence is gone for good. But even if the driver is not convicted, the licence committee can still decide not to extend it.
“We tend to take a very narrow view. We want people to feel safe in taxi cabs,” Taylor said.
Suspending the licence, if it hasn’t been done already, might take longer than the police investigation, Taylor said, but the appropriate decision will be made in the end.
“The two processes will all catch up with each other at the end of the day, but either way, the guy won’t be driving a taxi,” he said.
Police do not believe the sexual assault is linked to an earlier report in which a 17-year-old girl said on Nov. 2 she was sexually assaulted in Sandy Hill after hailing a cab in Gatineau. That case is still under investigation. The suspect in that case is described as a dark-skinned man in his 40s, with a medium build, brown eyes, short dark hair and an unshaven face.
That fare began in Gatineau, outside of Coventry’s operational jurisdiction, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it wasn’t one of its cabs. A cab from Ottawa could have picked up a fare that ended in Gatineau and then could have been flagged down in Gatineau before returning to Ottawa, Patni said. He doesn’t believe the vehicle was one of his, but the company continues to help police with that investigation.