New York City cabbies paid tribute to one of their own Sunday on the Harlem block where a driver died at the wheel during a July heat wave. The solemn memorial came two days after their fundraising campaign shipped his remains to his family in Ivory Coast.
Richard Coulibaly, a taxi driver for nearly 20 years, was found dead on July 2 inside his parked cab on Frederick Douglass Boulevard, police said. The grim discovery near West 116th Street set off a winding social media campaign by fellow Ivorians and the New York Taxi Workers Alliance to locate relatives of a man who had few friends and lived alone in a rented room in Harlem.
The search, which The City Reporter detailed Friday, eventually led to the 73-year-old driver’s loved ones in Ivory Coast, the West African nation that Coulibaly left for the United States in 1996.
“I’m very grateful for everything they did,” his daughter, Anne Marie Tatiana, 38, told The City Reporter.
Taxi Workers Alliance officials said Coulibaly’s remains arrived in the Ivorian city of Abidjan on Sunday afternoon, following a stop in Brussels. The journey was funded with donations to an online fundraising campaign established by the union.
“He had close friends, like one or two people, but he’s not someone who have like 50, 60 people, no,” added Tatiana, the second of Coulibaly’s four children. “When he’s your friend, he’s your friend, and people who knew him, they know that’s how he is.”
A small crowd of drivers on Sunday laid roses on Frederick Douglass Boulevard in tribute to Coulibaly. Among them were some Ivorian cabbies, who make up just over a half-percent of the roughly 180,000 drivers licensed by the New York City Taxi & Limousine Commission.
MORE: He Died in His NYC Taxi in a Heat Wave. Cabbies Are Returning His Body to Ivory Coast.
Bhairavi Desai, executive director of the Taxi Workers Alliance, said Coulibaly’s solitary existence spent far from family was one that resonated strongly with the largely immigrant driver workforce.
“Years ago, I had a driver at LaGuardia Airport say to me, ‘U.S.A. stands for you stand alone,’” Desai said. “There is a real feeling of once you’re in this country, you are easily discarded and spend every moment trying to prove why you shouldn’t be, and that’s a lot of isolation.”
She said many immigrant drivers are in a similar position to Coulibaly, who close friend Aboubacar Diakité, a Harlem small business owner, previously described as “working, working, working, every day working.”
“That life of isolation and the life of just work, work, work, it’s the life of too many of our immigrant brothers and sisters,” Desai said.
The successful search for Coulibaly’s relatives in Ivory Coast will enable him to be laid to rest in his family’s village, avoiding the prospect of an anonymous burial in New York City.
“Before we located the family, we were in constant touch with the [city chief] medical examiner’s office to let them know, ‘Please don’t send the body to potter’s field, there is a family, we know they’re going to find them and they will want an honorable, proper burial for their family member,’” Desai said.
Mouhamadou Aliya, a 54-year-old taxi driver from Ivory Coast who did not know Coulibaly, said he was moved by the response to his countryman’s death, whose cause remains under investigation. The 73-year-old man died during a heat wave marked by the first 100-degree day in New York City in more than a decade.
Only 3% of TLC drivers are 70 or older, according to TLC data.
“It’s very sad, it’s tough, no one wants to end like this,” Aliya said. “But at the end of the day, we still have to be grateful to be here in America, because not having nobody, we’re still here to honor him because the country has a big heart.”
MORE: The City Reporter’s coverage of the New York taxi industry.
Coulibaly’s daughter described him as a hardworking and “very private” man who was focused on making a living. His younger brother Christophe previously told The City Reporter he had not been aware Richard worked as a cabbie until those from New York told him.
“Sometimes we’d be talking and he’d be like, ‘Hey, I have to go, I’ll call you later,’ and that’s it,” Tatiana said of her father. “He was a very hardworking man, he was a very straightforward man.”
She added that Coulibaly would have been surprised that a memorial was held in public for someone with a “very tight circle” of friends.
“People who knew him, they loved him,” she said. “So that’s the way to pay the respect to him.”
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