A cabbie dies, a city moves on
At 12:34 p.m., a taxi driver named Mehari Bokrezion pulled into an empty spot next to a basketball court in SoHo in Manhattan, beneath a sign that told cabbies they could park for an hour and get some relief. He closed his eyes. Soon, he took his last breath.
The life of the city went on around Bokrezion, an Eritrean immigrant who was 59 and who had driven a yellow taxi for the same company for almost half his life. Commuters spilled out of the Canal St. subway station and walked past the taxi. Drivers parked in front of him and behind him, stood on the sidewalk chatting, and then left.
Night fell. Down the street, the fabulous showed their drivers’ licences to get into Jimmy, the rooftop bar at the fancy James Hotel. And finally, the next morning, just after the sun rose, about 18 hours after parking, Bokrezion, known as a quiet, kind man who never made a fuss at work, was found.
“It’s just so sad that so many people walked by during the day, and no one noticed,” said Ramsey Ahmed, 33, who runs a nearby food cart. “It’s just life in New York. Nobody really cares about anyone besides themselves.”
On his last day alive, Bokrezion took the subway to work like always. About 10 a.m., he drove to where he liked to start the day: La Guardia Airport in Queens. Bokrezion dropped his fare in TriBeCa, in Manhattan. Then he drove to a neighbourhood he knew well: The taxi stand on Thompson St. near the former home of Susan taxis, his employer.
Bokrezion parked carefully. His doors were locked. His windows were rolled up, but it was a pleasant day, about 22 C. Bokrezion was sitting up. To anyone walking by, he seemed to be sleeping.
His cause of death would later be ruled natural, due to cardiovascular disease.
Throughout the day, people walked past Bokrezion’s body, those with hair appointments at Haute Air, those with acupuncture appointments at Yupo Wellness, those just with someplace to be.
Ahmed walked by about 3:30 a.m. to set up his food cart. He saw Bokrezion, but thought nothing of it.
Franklin Lambert, 71, a taxi dispatcher, showed up at Susan taxis about 5 a.m. At some point in the next hour, Bokrezion’s wife called Lambert and said her husband never came home. Lambert checked the taxi’s GPS unit and saw that the car had not moved for almost a day. And he told Bokrezion’s wife where the cab was parked. She lived less than a kilometre away. At around the same time, at 6:30 a.m., a passerby noticed Bokrezion hadn’t moved and called 911. Bokrezion’s wife and brother arrived. His wife started crying, screaming, pounding on the window. Emergency workers arrived and broke the car’s window.
Lambert drove over from Brooklyn. “Even myself, seeing her, seeing her around the cab, it was so painful,” he said. “Such a painful thing to witness.”
Authorities covered Bokrezion’s body and hung yellow tape around the taxi stand. People gathered on the sidewalk, the hotel workers, the commuters.
But soon enough, the tape was pulled down. The taxis returned. All that remained of Bokrezion’s time was a small pile of broken glass. People walking by just figured that the glass was left from a petty crime, from something stolen inside a car.