Deadly fares
Were the shootings of two Sikh cabbies motivated by hate or money?

By A.C. Thompson

During the 1980s, with crack exploding and the economy faltering, legendary Miami Herald reporter Edna Buchanan wrote, "Miami's most dangerous profession is not police work or fire fighting, it is driving a cab. For taxi drivers, many of them poor immigrants, murder is an occupational hazard."

These days, cab drivers in Richmond can relate.

Two East Bay cabbies, both immigrants from India, both adherents of the Sikh faith, were shot during the month of July. One, Gurpreet Singh, 23, was killed. The other, Inderjit Singh (no relation; Singh is an extremely common Sikh surname), 29, caught a bullet in the jaw and survived. The crimes, neither of which has been solved, have prompted an outpouring of anger from members of the Sikh community, who fear they're being targeted because of their ethnicity and question the seriousness of police efforts to catch the shooters.

On a recent afternoon Pargat Singh Baath gave me a guided tour of the crime scenes, steering his battered beige cab through the hardscrabble, largely African American and Latino neighborhoods that surround the Richmond BART station. A native of the Punjab region, Baath wears a turban – an article of faith for members of the Khalsa Sikh order, who do not cut their hair – and a large square ruby ring on his right index finger.

Baath pulled onto the 1300 block of Roosevelt Avenue. It's a dead-end road illuminated by a single streetlight and flanked by a pair of run-down apartment buildings. This is where, on July 5, Inderjit Singh was blasted in the face. He'd been dispatched by Gray Line Taxi to pick up a fare at around 12:30 at night. When he rolled up to the address, two men swooped on the car, and one of them opened fire.

Until recently, Baath, who is 53, worked from 5 a.m. to as late as midnight to provide for his wife and three children. Since the shootings, both of which took place after midnight, Baath, like many of his fellow cabbies, has cut back his hours. "We are very scared. Now at 6:30 or 7, I go home," he said, adding that the shortened schedule is costing him "more than $50 a night."

He's had his own run-ins with firearms and the people who wield them – earlier this year he was robbed at gunpoint by a trio of young men. They made off with $150; the cabbie got away with his face intact.

Gurpreet Singh wasn't so lucky. He was slain on the 100 block of 21st Street, less than a mile from the site where Inderjit Singh was shot. It was a similar setup: on July 2 somebody called Gray Line looking for a late-night ride, luring him to an isolated one-way street bordered by BART train tracks and the high gray wall of the AC Transit bus depot. As he drove down the block, one or more armed men approached the cab and shot him. It wasn't a robbery. His friends say he had money, gold jewelry, and a laptop computer in the cab, none of which were taken.

In India, his fiancée, who'd been planning to join him in the States, killed herself when she got the news.

There are no flowers, no memorial signage to mark the spot where Gurpreet Singh died.

"We are feeling these two shootings are connected. Same company, same time," Baath said. Asked if he thought the attacks were racially motivated, he only shrugged.

Kavneet Singh, an activist with the Sikh Mediawatch and Resource Task Force, doesn't have any doubts. "Let's be honest," he said, "this is a hate crime." And in his view, the Richmond Police Department mounted an anemic investigation in the immediate aftermath of the two incidents. "Clearly there's been some apathy and lack of due diligence on their part," he told me.

The bloodshed has galvanized local Sikhs. About 30 cabbies, mostly Sikhs, have met twice with the Richmond cops and other local law enforcement officials to voice their concerns and frustrations. Cabbies claim Richmond police are often slow to respond to their 911 calls for help – and sometimes don't respond at all. "Any time you have a customer who no pay and you call the police, the police no coming," taxi driver Jaswinder Singh said.

Contra Costa County supervisor John Gioia, who helped arrange the talks, said he's concerned about the quality of the police investigation. The Sikh community, he said, "is worried that they haven't heard anything from the Richmond P.D. [about the status of the cases]."

Richmond police captain Lori Ritter deflected criticism. "When people are traumatized by crimes like this, they tend to lash out at the police," she said. "The detectives on the case are following up leads with every other law enforcement agency in the Bay Area, looking to see if there are any similar cases."

According to Ritter, Richmond cops think both attacks were botched robberies, not hate crimes. Police responding to the murder of Gurpreet Singh found Charles Clifton Cain digging through his pockets for cash. Cain was arrested and released without charges but remains a suspect in the case. In Inderjit Singh's case, she said, "There were no racial slurs or derogatory comments [hurled at the driver]."

Some, however, see the gunfire as evidence of a rift between African Americans and recent Indian immigrants. Parked at the Richmond BART station, Lisa Evans, proprietor of Lady L's Taxi, said, "At times [Sikh cabbies] have been rude and disrespectful [to black customers]. Some cab drivers ask for money up front if it's a black person. That puts people on the offensive."

Evans, who is African American, thinks the shootings were "a revenge thing" for perceived wrongs.

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