A WIDOW’S TALE : Two Cabdrivers Are Slain at the Wheel; the Women They Leave Behind Reach Out to Each Other and to Prevent More Killings

In the warm glow of late afternoon, the 500 block of South Coronado Street west of downtown Los Angeles does not look like a killing ground. Few of the modest bungalows are decaying. The once-resplendent apartment houses, though faded, still teem with life. Only the gang graffiti scrawled across stucco walls and the bits of broken glass lining the curb--glittery remnants of car-stereo rip-offs--suggest this is not the safest place to be once the sun goes down. It is a block interchangeable, perhaps, with hundreds of others in the mostly immigrant neighborhood. Yet, this small stretch of inner city is the setting of a nightmare for Karyn Imrich. It was here on Oct. 12, 1990, that her mate, Stanley Kolsky, a cabdriver, was murdered.

At about 5 p.m. that day, people on Coronado Street caught a glimpse of a passing taxicab. The driver appeared to be struggling with a lone passenger seated behind him. The witnesses said they heard yelling inside the cab, then what sounded like a gunshot. The driver slumped. As the cab veered out of control, the passenger, described as a Latino in his 30s, climbed into the front seat, shoved the driver out the door and sped away. Kolsky, a bullet hole near his right temple, was probably dead before his body hit the asphalt. Police would discover his cab parked three blocks away. The killer who abandoned it has never been found. “What I remember most,” Karyn Imrich says today of the death scene, “is the dark spot on the tar--the blood.”

Kolsky wasn’t the first L.A. cabbie killed in an apparent robbery attempt nor, certainly, the last. And Karyn was not the last woman devastated by such violence. Deborah Imaku was left widowed when her cabbie husband, Titus, was shot to death in an alley in Southwest Los Angeles, just seven months after Kolsky was killed. In all, at least eight L.A. County cabdrivers have been murdered on the job since 1989, three more than the number of law enforcement officers slain on duty in the county during the same period.

“It’s the most dangerous occupation in America,” contends James L. Szekely, director of the National Taxi Drivers Safety Council, “but people have more concern for saving the whales than they do cabdrivers.”

Which is where the story of Deborah Imaku and Karyn Imrich begins.

Imaku, shy and soft-spoken, is a 35-year-old African-American mother of two who lives in a Compton housing project and scrapes by on $700 a month in Social Security income. The 45-year-old Imrich is an outgoing and animated transplanted New Yorker, given to leggings and sculpted nails, who works as an office manager for a Commerce clothing manufacturer and lives with two cats on a quiet drive adjacent to Beverly Hills. They were two women different in virtually every way save for tragic coincidence: Each one lived with a cabdriver shot by a passenger sitting in the back seat of his vehicle. But if Los Angeles is a checkerboard upon which violence randomly transcends racial and cultural bounds, it is also a community where strangers can find strength in each other and sometimes, amid tragedy, make a difference.

Hoping to salvage something from the loss of their men, Imrich and Imaku worked together to bring about the passage of a regulation that may help save the lives of other L.A. cabdrivers--a law requiring that protective partitions be installed in all taxicabs licensed by the city. One woman was black, the other white; one a Gentile, the other a Jew. That Imrich and Imaku came from opposite sides of the tracks did not matter as they pursued a common goal. “We all bleed the same,” Deborah Imaku says softly. “We all feel the same pain.”

Not everyone within the taxi industry has supported their cause. They have been accused by many drivers of meddling in a business they know little about. Some believe that the two women will have saved few lives by their efforts while costing cabbies untold thousands of dollars in income.

“Those damn widows,” one cab company executive sighed when asked about Imrich and Imaku. “Those damn widows.”

IT BEGAN WITH A NEWSPAPER photograph.

Sipping tea at home on a Saturday morning in May, 1991, Karyn Imrich read about Titus Imaku’s murder in The Times. A picture of Imaku’s widow and two children accompanied a brief story. Karyn stared at the grieving black woman and saw herself. I know what she’s going through, Karyn thought. I can relate to her. When the cab company’s office opened that Monday morning, Karyn got Deborah’s telephone number, then dialed. “Deborah,” she said, “you don’t know me, but I wondered if there is anything I can do. My husband was a cabdriver. He was murdered six months ago.”

They didn’t talk much in that first conversation. They mostly cried. Karyn gave Deborah her number and told her to call any time. Deborah promised she would. After they hung up, Karyn closed her eyes. Please God, she prayed, give her the strength to go through what I’ve gone through.

Karyn had been an associate buyer for Frederick’s of Hollywood when she met Stanley Kolsky in 1977. Kolsky, a burly, street-wise clothing salesman, had stopped by to drop off some samples. He was from Brooklyn, she from Yonkers. Both were mile-a-minute talkers. She liked him from the start.

Over cocktails the next night, Stanley confided that he was married with three children.

“The last thing I need,” Karyn said before walking out, “is to get involved with a married man.” But Stanley persisted. “I’m getting a divorce,” he declared when she reluctantly agreed to see him again. And a few months later he did.

He moved into Karyn’s tony, Spanish-style duplex on Hoover Street, half a block from Beverly Hills. He’d fix her vegetable lasagna and whip up elaborate chicken dishes. They took night classes together, studied Jewish literature, went to movies, played weekend hosts to his children. They lived happily like husband and wife.

But by spring, 1988, with the economy and the garment industry slipping, Kolsky needed another job. You like being out and about, you know the city like the back of your hand, Karyn told him. Why not drive a cab? By April, he was plying the streets for L.A. Taxi Co. in a black bow tie and a lemon-colored cab.

He liked the work, the freedom, the opportunity to meet new people. Often, Karyn remembers, he’d come home with recipes he’d swapped with his passengers. His fellow cabbies were an eclectic bunch: students, moonlighting writers, dreamers, losers, former bankers and lawyers--many of them immigrants who, like himself, were biding time until the economy turned around. They taught him to ignore most “flag-downs,” people who hail passing cabs from the roadside rather than telephoning for a taxi in advance. Flag-downs sometimes have guns, they warned him. Picking up the wrong one can get you killed.

No one can say with certainty that it was a flag-down who murdered Stanley Kolsky. What is known is that he left home in his taxi late that afternoon after notifying his dispatcher that he was en route to what L.A. cabbies call “The Hill,” a downtown staging area along Grand Avenue near the Museum of Contemporary Art where drivers can often be found chewing the fat while waiting for calls. Stanley never got there.

Other cabdrivers heard about Stanley’s death before Karyn did. Two of them arrived at her house that night to pay their respects but left without explaining why they’d come when they realized that Karyn still hadn’t been notified about the murder. Sensing that something might be wrong, Karyn called the police, even as two officers arrived on her doorstep. “I’m afraid I have some bad news,” a detective on the phone said. Karyn’s heart began to pound. “Your husband’s been shot. He’s dead.”

Karyn remembers how her legs turned to rubber and how she suddenly found herself on the floor. She remembers how one of the officers, a woman, sat down with her and how odd it seemed that the officer made no effort to console her but just sat there. She remembers thinking, Now I’ve got to go out and buy coffee for everybody who’ll be coming over to “sit shiva”-- the mourning process traditionally practiced by Jews. And she remembers how the tears came and wouldn’t stop.

After she buried Stanley, Karyn went to the county coroner’s office and retrieved a manila envelope with his blood-covered personal effects: his watch, bifocals, a ballpoint pen, a dollar bill, a quarter. She also found the silver Hebrew chai, a talisman shaped like the letter n , that Stanley had worn on a chain around his neck. Karyn took everything home, cleaned it up and put it in a box--all except the chai , which she now wears.

Karyn went back to work, still grappling with the cruel suddenness of Stanley’s death. I never even got a chance to say goodby. She made a point to get a copy of “Why Bad Things Happen to Good People.”

Then she read about Deborah Imaku.

WHEN TWO WEEKS PASSED AFTER THEIR first conversation and Karyn hadn’t heard back from Deborah, she decided to try once more. Deborah, it turned out, had lost Karyn’s phone number and was pleased to talk with her again. In the background Karyn could hear the voice of Deborah’s daughter, who was asking, “Is that Daddy?”

Deborah talked about Titus’ dreams for the future, about how the family never got to take a vacation together because he was always too busy working and studying. Karyn shared how she missed the way Stanley would sometimes sneak up and just hold her, for no reason. Deborah said she couldn’t accept the notion that Titus was really dead, that he wouldn’t be coming home any day now. Karyn said she often felt the same about Stanley. “Call me,” Karyn told Deborah as they said goodby. “Even if it’s in the middle of the night and you just need someone to talk to. Call me.”

Days later, Deborah did call. “I’m sorry to bother you at work,” she said, crying. “I just miss Titus so much. Does the pain go away? Does it ever get better?” Karyn told her the truth: “It does get better. But you can’t put a time limit on it. And the pain will always be there.”

Deborah sobbed. “I just miss him so much.”

They had met in 1983 as students in the library at Compton Community College. There was a power outage and the library’s electric doors wouldn’t open. As they waited for someone to free them, Titus walked over and introduced himself. He was a Nigerian with a wide smile, a man as direct as Deborah was demure. He had been in the United States for four years, and was studying for a degree in accounting and finance. He asked for Deborah’s telephone number and, to his amazement, she gave it to him. Afterward, he walked her to class, then raced home and dialed the number, still not believing that she would be interested in dating him. They were married a year later.

By 1990, Deborah and Titus were living in a cramped walk-up apartment on the fringes of Compton. With them were Brittany, their 5-year-old daughter, and Brandon, Deborah’s 10-year-old son from a previous relationship. Life was a struggle. Though Titus had since earned a bachelor’s degree in finance from Cal State Dominguez Hills, he could not find a job in his chosen field, banking. Nobody wanted to hire a foreigner, he complained, especially a black one. So he had gone back to school, at Cal State Long Beach, to study engineering by day while working as a hospital laboratory technician at night. He remained convinced that America was a land of opportunity. Education is the key, he’d tell the kids. They can take everything away from you, he’d say, but not your education.

In August, 1990, Titus was laid off from his hospital job. A Nigerian friend who drove a taxi encouraged him to apply for work as a cabdriver. You can drive at night and study during the day, the friend promised. You can make $100 or more a shift and another $20 or so in tips. Despite Deborah’s concern that the streets were too dangerous, Titus applied to Long Beach Yellow Cab and was soon driving Car 298, working from late afternoon until the hours before dawn.

He showed her the computer inside his cab. If there’s trouble, he explained, I can push a button, a little dot shows up on the dispatch computer. The dispatchers would call the police to be on the lookout for his cab and trouble. He carried a pocketful of coins and stopped at pay phones every few hours to let her know he was OK. “Don’t worry,” he’d say reassuringly, “we’ll grow old together.” But each afternoon, Deborah would kiss him as if for the last time. “Baby, be careful,” she’d whisper as he walked out the door.

She’d pray for his safe return each night. Long after the kids were asleep, she would often lie awake until 3:30 a.m., listening for his footsteps on the apartment stairs. When he came home, she would massage his aching shoulders and they would talk about the future, about the house in the suburbs they would own one day.

Titus left for work on April 30, 1991, as he always did, with coins in his pocket for phone calls home and his books in a bag so he could study between fares. Deborah put the kids to bed and drifted off to sleep.

At about 5 a.m., she was startled awake by a knock at the door. Outside were two somber LAPD detectives asking to come in. Brittany wandered into the living room, rubbing her eyes sleepily. The police asked Deborah to send the little girl back to bed, then asked her to sit down. There’s been a terrible accident, they said. Titus has been shot. He’s dead.

Titus had picked up a teen-age girl at a drug treatment clinic in Long Beach at about 9 p.m. that night. He had driven her to Southwest Los Angeles, where he stopped to pick up three of her friends--another teen-age girl and two young men, purported gang members. Titus chauffeured them to a Boys supermarket and waited while they picked up some yogurt, cold cuts and beer. After they climbed back in his cab, they directed Titus from one street to the next. Finally, they told him to turn into a darkened alley near 57th Street and Gramercy Place.

According to detectives, one of the girls present that night would later describe how lighthearted Titus seemed, how he talked about the value of an education, how he never saw the handgun being raised by one of the men in the back seat and never said a word as two bullets exploded through the back of his skull. The men dragged Titus out of the cab, took his wallet and his book bag, rifled the telephone change from his pocket and even pulled off his right shoe looking for money--missing the $100 Titus kept stashed in his left sock.

A nearby homeowner heard shots but didn’t think to call the police. You hear shooting all the time in this neighborhood, he’d tell officers after going out for an appointment half an hour later and discovering Titus’ body near his garage.

Investigators say they cracked the case after another cabdriver remembered having given a ride earlier that night to one of the teen-age girls who was in Titus’ taxi when he was shot. Two reputed Crips gang members, Marcus (Ghost) Jefferson, 25, and alleged triggerman Kenneth (Youngster) Redman, 22, have been charged in the crime. Both remain in jail awaiting trial.

DEBORAH IMAKU AND KARYN IMRICH BEGAN PHONING EACH OTHER ONCE a week, sometimes more often. When the county coroner’s office notified Deborah that she could come down and pick up Titus’ personal effects, she called Karyn first. They’re going to give you an envelope with his things, Karyn advised her. It’ll be difficult to deal with. It was. The envelope smelled of Titus’ cologne. Inside was Titus’ watch, dappled with dried blood.

Her friends complained that Deborah was becoming increasingly depressing to be around. Why can’t she just let go of him, they’d ask. But Karyn understood what it means to grieve, what it means to lose your companion. Though Karyn was just a voice on the phone, she was always ready to listen, to empathize.

Then, a few weeks after Titus’ death, Jim Szekely phoned Deborah from Florida. A salty, former union-activist-turned-taxi-driver-advocate, Szekely had himself barely survived a 1984 knifing attack while driving a cab in Tampa. As with Titus Imaku, Szekely’s assailant had been sitting in the back seat. Ever since, Szekely had campaigned ceaselessly for mandatory regulations providing bullet-resistant plastic partitions between the driver and passenger compartments of all cabs. He had been trying without success for at least three years to get somebody in Los Angeles city government to listen to him about partitions, and now another defenseless cabbie was dead, he told Deborah. Maybe your husband would be alive today, Szekely said, had a partition been in his taxi.

Somebody, however, had been listening to Szekely. When Titus Imaku’s death was followed by the murders of two more cabdrivers, L.A. City Councilman Nate Holden decided to put the matter before the council’s Transportation Committee, which Holden chairs. Holden had proposed an ordinance in 1989 that would have made partitions mandatory. That effort seemed to have died after being forwarded to the city’s Department of Transportation for review. Though department officials insisted that they had been studying the motion all along, Szekely suspected them of having dragged their feet at the behest of cab company officials and independent drivers who didn’t want to pay for the devices, which cost about $550 apiece.

Officials in several other cities, among them New York and Boston, have reported that casualties among taxi drivers have been greatly reduced with the use of the partitions. Still, many L.A. cabbies say partitions may appear formidable but are, in fact, essentially worthless. What’s to stop some nut from shooting you through the side window? Or the front? Safety partitions, they complain, turn the back seat into a cage, reducing leg room, limiting air flow and inhibiting conversation between passenger and driver--all of which can leave fares less inclined to tip big at the ride’s end. “Here’s the bottom line,” says Dianne Wohlleben, who drove a cab for 13 years and, until last month, served as spokesperson for the Independent Taxi Owners Assn. “Would you want mandatory bars on your windows just because there was a robbery down the street?”

Despite such reluctance, Holden insisted that it was time to push the issue--and so did Szekely. He desperately wanted to appear before Holden’s committee but couldn’t scrape together enough money for the air fare. Nonetheless, Szekely knew someone in Los Angeles whose view on the value of partitions would carry more weight than his ever could: Deborah Imaku. He called her again. “You have a right to say something,” he told her.

But talking openly before a gathering of city officials about the loss of her husband--even if it meant saving the husbands of other women--was the last thing Deborah wanted to do. Her hurt was too deep, her fear of public speaking too great. She declined.

If Szekely’s days as a United Auto Workers union man taught him anything, it was persistence. He began mailing Deborah reports and news clippings demonstrating the value of safety partitions. On the corner of each envelope, Szekely would write “Very important,” circled in red ink to drive home the point. Szekely also began telephoning regularly, imploring Deborah to testify. “Ten words from you,” he told her, “are worth a thousand from me.”

Deborah anguished. How could I possibly stand up in front of strangers and let them see my pain? She thought of Titus and how strong he would have been faced with the same challenge. What would Titus want me to do?

In August, 1991, Deborah drove downtown with her sister-in-law, Mary Imaku, to appear before Holden’s three-member Transportation Committee. She listened as, one after another, taxi drivers and executives went before the microphone to condemn mandatory partitions. “If you’re gonna do half of it,” one exasperated cabbie declared, “you might as well do the whole damn thing--why not make the side windows and the windshield bulletproof?” The president of L.A. Taxi, for whom Stanley had worked, advised Holden’s committee that fully half of his 800 drivers didn’t want partitions, even though the company, the city’s largest, had volunteered to provide them free of charge following Titus’ murder.

Committee member Hal Bernson was swayed. “If drivers don’t want it, they probably shouldn’t have to have it,” Bernson said. “Maybe we ought to amend this thing.”

And then it was Deborah’s turn to speak.

“Good afternoon,” she began, her soft voice already trembling with emotion, “my name is Deborah Imaku. I have a very special interest in this. My husband was the taxi driver killed on May 1. I feel that it should be mandatory, that the other taxi drivers shouldn’t have an option.”

She told them how she never wanted Titus to drive a cab, how he assured her it was safe and how he promised they they would grow old together. She began to cry. She felt as if she might faint. But she went on. “The only thing that could’ve saved my husband’s life is that shield,” she said, tears streaming down her cheeks. “Not a day that I don’t get up, that I don’t think about him. Not only him. I think about the other taxi drivers. They don’t realize that . . . the people they leave behind, we have to go on. We have to think about this. And we have to deal with this, which is very hard.”

The committee members--Holden, Bernson and Councilwoman Joan Milke Flores--listened in rapt silence as Deborah spoke. Afterward, Holden directed the Department of Transportation to begin drafting a new law requiring partitions in all cabs. “My heart,” he would later observe, “bled for her.”

Researching and writing a municipal ordinance, however, is a process that can take months, only to be defeated when ultimately put to a vote of the entire City Council. There was no assurance that Holden’s proposal would ever become reality, especially given the level of opposition. Deborah heard that an advisory body to the council, the L.A. Board of Transportation Commissioners, was contemplating a similar administrative regulation. A public hearing was scheduled. Still, she wasn’t sure whether she could stand the anguish of having to speak out once more. She called Karyn Imrich.

Szekely, as it turned out, also had telephoned Karyn, encouraging her to go public as well. Her response was immediate. “I’ll do anything,” Karyn told him, “to try to prevent another person from experiencing this kind of pain.” When Deborah called and mentioned the upcoming hearing, Karyn was adamant. “Deborah,” she said, “this is something we have to do.” Deborah knew she was right.

They spoke again the night before the hearing. Both were nervous but excited about the prospect of finally getting to meet each other face-to-face. Deborah wanted to know what Karyn looked like. “Well,” Karyn began, “I’m kind of tall, rather thin, with very short hair. And I’m white.” As if Deborah couldn’t tell over the phone. They both laughed. Karyn was waiting the next morning at City Hall when Deborah arrived with daughter Brittany. Karyn recognized them immediately from their picture in the paper and walked over.

“Karyn?”

“Hi, Deborah.”

The two women embraced without another word.

Once more, cabdrivers filed to the microphone to complain about partitions. Once more, Deborah spoke from the heart. A little more strongly this time, she recounted Titus’ hopes for the future and how, for lack of a shield, those hopes would never be realized. Make the partitions mandatory, Deborah demanded. Order them installed in each and every cab.

After she finished, Karyn spoke. Her voice broke. Her body began to shake and her eyes welled as she fought back the tears: “Try to imagine, if you will, and put yourself in my shoes for those first few hours when I was told by the detective that I will no longer see, touch or feel my husband again and that his life was destroyed and violated by having the back of his head blown open and that ‘your better half, your significant other’ is now a statistic and a cold piece of meat lying on a stainless-steel gurney in the morgue. All because no owner of a taxicab business, no one in the city of Los Angeles, who were aware of these shields since 1989 . . . cared enough about the lives of the men and women who drive cabs as a public service to the community.”

She was trembling as she returned to her seat next to Deborah. Deborah grasped her hand and said: “You did fine.”

THERE WOULD BE A SERIES OF AT LEAST THREE MORE PUBLIC MEETINGS OF the transportation commission on the issue of taxi partitions. Karyn and Deborah spoke at each. Between meetings, they wrote letters and provided statistics to city officials--courtesy of Szekely--supporting the contention that the shields save lives. They also prayed.

A month after Deborah first appeared before Holden’s council committee, the city’s three-member Board of Transportation Commissioners scheduled a final hearing on the matter. Once again, cabdrivers trooped to the lectern, speaking in opposition to the partitions. Once again, Deborah and Karyn countered them. The widows’ tears were fewer this time, supplanted by a growing confidence, a resolve. And then the ballot was taken: it was unanimous--half of the city’s cabs would be required to have partitions by the middle of August, 1992, and the other half by the middle of this month.

The two women grasped each other’s hand and smiled.

No one believes that the partitions are foolproof. Some drivers already are complaining that the type of partitions authorized by city officials couldn’t stop a BB gun. But, as Nate Holden puts it, “If it will just save one life, chances are we’ve done the right thing.” He and others insist that the regulation making taxi shields mandatory could not have been achieved without the impassioned words of Karyn Imrich and Deborah Imaku.

“You can express feeling in the naked, written word, but it is something altogether different to have seen the pain, the loss, that these ladies went through,” says David A. Leveton, president of the transportation commission. “They were extremely influential.”

Says Alan E. Willis, who heads the city’s taxi licensing authority: “They galvanized the political will with their pleas to the point that it was going to happen whether the drivers wanted it or not. They were very persuasive.”

Szekely has since focused his efforts on other cities where taxi shields are not yet mandatory, including his hometown of Tampa.

“My dream,” he says, “is to sit on my porch one day and watch the cabs go by, knowing that there won’t be any more widows and orphans.”

Karyn and Deborah returned to their respective worlds after their victory at City Hall. Their friendship endures, as it began, on the telephone. They call each other on holidays, or whenever they’re simply feeling down.

A few months ago, Karyn remembers thinking, You’ve got to turn yourself around. You’ve got to get out and meet new people. And then it just hit me: hell, I want a motorcycle. She now rides a chrome-and-black Honda Shadow, the wind on her face.

Deborah has taken to volunteering a few hours each day at her daughter’s elementary school. She’s planning to put in job applications as a preschool teacher and hopes that the eventual prosecution of her husband’s two alleged killers will put his death behind her. But for now, she continues to grapple with the past, seeking to answer the aching question of why such a good man, her man, had to die. Few nights go by that she doesn’t automatically awaken at about 3:30 a.m., expecting to hear his footsteps on the stairs. Few afternoons pass without her mind drifting back to that horrible moment when she realized he was gone forever. Why didn’t God watch over him ? Did I forget to pray that day? She still wears the wedding ring Titus gave her.

In the months following Titus’ death, Deborah Imaku could not bring herself to look at a taxi. But these days, driving her daughter to and from school, she makes a point to study each cab as it passes by. She smiles inside, just a little, when she sees a safety partition.

“My husband and Karyn’s Stanley never had a fighting chance,” she says. “Maybe now, the next person will.”