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Cab Driver's Widow Wonders Why?

Photo of the late Cyril Obinka and his widow Chiamaka Obinka

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By STEPHEN THOMPSON | The Tampa Tribune

Published: May 5, 2008

ST. PETERSBURG Cradling their 22-week-old baby, Chiamaka Obinka wept Monday as she wondered aloud why anyone would kill her husband, cab driver Cyril Obinka.

"I just want to know why – why did they kill him?" Obinka said during an interview in the family's home. "We had no trouble with nobody."

Her 43-year-old husband died Friday night after he was shot inside his Blue Star taxi and crashed into a building at the Palm View apartment complex, 5420 26th St. S., St. Petersburg police have said.

His death is a mystery to detectives, St. Petersburg police spokesman Bill Proffitt said. There is no motive, nor are there any suspects.

The last time Chiamaka saw her husband was Friday afternoon, when he dropped by to eat lunch and play with their infant daughter Ginika. She did not know, she said, that would be the last time she saw him alive.

"I've been unable to sleep, I've been unable to eat," said Chiamaka, who, like Cyril, is from Nigeria. "I don't have an appetite anymore." She said Cyril planned on making a trip this year to the West African country, to see his parents, but now she has to deliver his body to them.

"He's a quiet man," she said of her husband. "He find no trouble with nobody."

"They just took him away from his family," she said.

Her husband has been in the United States for almost 10 years and is a citizen of this country, she said. They met when he returned to Nigeria for a friend's wedding and they wed three years ago.

The young family lives in a well-kempt house in the 700 block of 69th Avenue South and Chiamaka planned on starting nursing classes at St. Petersburg College next week while her husband continued to earn money as a cab driver, she said.

"I don't know what my life is going to be now," she said.

Reporter Stephen Thompson can be reached at (727) 451-2336 or spthompson@tampatrib.com. Reporter Rod Challenger can be reached at (727) 536-8443.

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