Cabdriver Shot in July Dies; on Job for 4 Months

Sharyn Kamrath, the cabdriver who was paralyzed from the neck down after an assailant shot her through the neck during a July 29 robbery, died Tuesday morning at Scripps Memorial Hospital in La Jolla, authorities said.

“We’re all kind of down today,” Clint Edwards, co-manager of Coast Cab Co., said Tuesday. “We approach her death with mixed emotions. . . . She wasn’t going to walk again or be able to live a full life.

“We got the impression from her on our visits that she wasn’t fighting what happened.”

In remembrance, the flag at the cab company’s 9th Avenue and G Street parking lot was flying at half staff.

Kamrath, 40, had been a cabdriver for only four months when she was shot by her passenger in the back of the neck and left to die on the shoulder of Gilman Drive, near Interstate 5 in La Jolla. Though barely able to speak after the attack, Kamrath managed to describe her assailant to a police artist from her hospital bed with the aid of a lip reader earlier this month.

Copies of the drawing made by the Los Angeles artist were distributed to cabdrivers, law-enforcement officers and the media, San Diego police spokesman Bill Robinson said.

The suspect is described as a clean-shaven man, possibly of Cuban or Puerto Rican descent, in his late 20s or early 30s. He is about 5-foot-8 with a medium build.

Kamrath apparently picked up the killer at 6th Avenue and Broadway about 10 p.m. July 29, police said. She drove the man to the 8100 block of Gilman Drive, where he robbed her of less than $10, shot her and dumped her body beside the road. He then drove away in her cab, abandoning it at 4th Avenue and Upas Street.

Anyone with information on the man is asked to call the police.

Because of the shooting, Edwards said, cabdrivers are more cautious and have established a secret code, known only to drivers and dispatchers, to alert the dispatcher if a man fitting the suspect’s description is spotted.

The San Diego County coroner’s office said the exact cause of Kamrath’s death won’t be known until an autopsy is completed today.