Taxi Driver Found Shot to Death in the Bronx

Mr. Barry in a photo with their three sons. Ms. Jolloh is pregnant with their fourth child. (PHOTO CREDIT: Stephen Yang for The New York Times)

In the modest apartment, a fourth-floor walk-up in the Bronx, the women — well over two dozen of them — lined the walls and sat on the floor. They prayed. They cried. And in a back room, more of them packed in around Kadiatou Jolloh, her face damp with tears, as she lay on a bed, grappling with the loss of her husband.

“He loved me, he loved me, he loved me, he loved me,” she said, the tears streaming again, as the relatives and friends around her also started to cry.

Her husband, Mamadou Barry, was found shot to death in his livery cab early Monday morning, a few miles from his home.

“He’s my everything,” she said, her voice weak. Ms. Jolloh, who had three sons with Mr. Barry and is eight months pregnant with their fourth child, struggled to speak, but the women encouraged her to talk about her husband.

Mr. Barry, 39, came to the United States about 15 years ago from the West African country of Guinea and has been a driver for much of that time. He worked mostly overnight, coming home just as his children were waking up.

“He worked so hard to provide for me and my kids,” Ms. Jolloh, 26, said. “He worked seven days a week, even if he was sick.”

“Someone took him for no reason,” she said. “He won’t see his baby.”

She began to sob.

The police said that around 1:30 a.m., Mr. Barry was found in the driver’s seat of his borough taxi, a green Lincoln Town Car, near the intersection of East 189th Street and Beaumont Avenue in the Bronx. He had been shot in the head and was pronounced dead at the scene.

“He was murdered, we believe, in a dispute over the fare that he had picked up,” Robert K. Boyce, the New York Police Department’s chief of detectives, told reporters.

Late Monday, the police released surveillance footage showing the suspect, whom they described as a man with a thin build seen in a red hooded sweatshirt and light-colored shorts.

The police commissioner, William J. Bratton, said that Mr. Barry was an “innocent” victim.

Even as crime in New York City has fallen to near historic lows, Mr. Barry’s death was the latest in a string of shootings that continued after a weekend of violence across the city. Eight people were killed, including three people shot to death outside a public housing complex early Sunday morning in Fort Greene, Brooklyn.

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SOURCE: NY Times, Rick Rojas