At 1:14 a.m. on Canada Day, 1991, someone called Metro Cabs and asked for a taxi on Willowdale Avenue and Byng Street in the Yonge Street - Sheppard Avenue area. Metro and Yellow Cabs shared a dispatch service and operated out of the same office. When the call was announced Yellow Cab driver Anthony (Tony) Ekunah accepted it. He liked to play the Willowdale area and used the Finch Subway station as his base. A few minutes later he radioed that he had picked up the fare and was going to Finch Avenue East and Leslie Street. That was the last anyone heard from him. At about 8 a.m. Yellow Cab no. 670 was noticed blocking the driveway of a vacant house on Rondeau Drive near Leslie Street and Steele Avenue East. The blue Chevrolet Caprice was parked on a hill on the wrong side of the street about a metre from the curb. The gearshift was in park but the meter was still running. When the cab was still there at 11 a.m. a man living next door to the vacant house, which was up for sale, investigated. He found Mr. Ekunah's body slumped against a dash vent on the passenger side of the car. He had been stabbed several times and the interior of the car, including the half-open passenger window, was splashed with blood. It was Toronto's 48th homicide of the year. Mr. Ekunah, 35, had come from Nigeria with his wife Rafinah in 1986. Originally they settled in Montréal but moved to Toronto soon afterward because neither of them spoke French. They lived in a small house in the Bathurst Avenue-Finch Avenue West area. At the time of Mr. Ekunah's death he and Rafinah had a two year old son and she was expecting their second child. She subsequently gave birth to a daughter and named her Toni. Mr. Ekunah initially worked as a security guard and as a packager in a warehouse while Rafinah worked in a clothing factory. Mr. Ekunah turned to taxi driving because he wanted to be his own boss. He owned the Caprice but rented his taxi license. He normally worked 12 hours a day, quitting at about 4 a.m. A fellow driver said that Mr. Ekunah had a reputation for being "aggressive" and "tough" when dealing with unruly passengers and speculated that this might have contributed to his death. Mr. Ekunah's ambition was to set up a warehouse in his home town of Potacou, Nigeria, and export clothing and consumer goods from Canada. He had recently graduated from a business program at York University and was in the process of setting up the warehouse when he was killed. His aim was to create a business that would enable his seven siblings and their families to escape from poverty. Police at first thought they had good leads and were optimistic about a speedy resolution of the case. However, although the leads resulted in arrests for unrelated crimes, Mr. Ekunah's "random and senseless" murder remained a mystery. The motive was thought to be robbery although Mr. Ekunah's money and jewelry were still on his body.

Anthony Ekunah. (Source:Toronto Police Service Cold Case Files) There were still no arrests a year later. Mr. Ekunah's dreams died with him and the couple's savings were quickly used up, much of the money going to transport Mr. Ekunah's body back to Nigeria. In a cruel irony Rafinah Ekunah was unable to collect funeral and death benefits from their insurance company. The company denied her claim and an arbitrator, demonstrating how finely a hair could be split, "reasoned that the taxi cab of Mr. Ekunah was merely the location of the crime and there was no objective evidence to show that the death was connected to Mr. Ekunah's use of the vehicle as a taxi cab." Rafinah Ekunah elected to stay in Canada. Although fluent in Spanish she had little knowledge of English when she arrived in 1986. Since her husband's death she earned a high school certificate and was enrolled in a law enforcement program at Seneca college. Originally from Equatorial Guinea, she met Mr. Ekunah in 1983 through family friends while she was on vacation in Nigeria. At the time he was a university student. They kept in touch and were married two years later. In an interview in 1992 she said her two children were all that kept her going. "I want them to get a career and to do something with their lives." Her 3-year-old son Michael still asked after his father. "Sometimes he says, 'Mommy, please let daddy come back', because he thinks I've hidden him. Sometimes he says he wants to go to Africa and see his daddy." In 2016 Mr. Ekunah's murder was still unsolved. The Toronto Police Service appealed for information on their web site.