Malek Moussa, 42, came to Canada from Lebanon in 1985 to escape the civil war there. He was married and the father of three children aged between five and 12 years old. Prior to coming to Canada he had worked for six years in Saudi Arabia as technical supervisor. As with so many other immigrants his professional qualifications were not recognized in Canada and he had to support himself and his family by driving a cab. His cousin Georges Najm characterized him as gentle, educated, hard-working and selfless. Sometimes we used to tease him and say, 'don't work so hard, leave some money for others,' but he would say, 'I have a family, I must work.' Sometime after 1 a.m. on Sunday, February 21, 1993, Mr. Moussa was parked at the Place d'Orleans shopping mall. Two young men, one aged 16 and the other 18, got into his cab and asked him to drive to an address in the Fallingbrook neighbourhood in suburban Orleans on the east side of Ottawa. The two young men had just walked from a nearby apartment on St. Joseph Boulevard that was a "party place" for teenage street toughs and high school students. While at the apartment the 16-year-old had tried to persuade others to join him in robbing a cab driver. Toying with a piece of wire, he talked about "doing" a taxi driver and proposed that he use the wire to choke the driver from behind while somebody else grabbed the driver's money. The ostensible motive was robbery. He wanted $200 for a trip to Montreal. A psychiatric assessment would later suggest a more deep-seated motive. It portrayed the 16-year-old as having a "pro criminal" attitude; "crime was a big topic of conversation among him and his friends. He would talk of committing robberies and believed the consequences were minimal." The 18-year-old agreed to join the 16-year-old in the robbery, but he clearly had motives of his own. He talked openly about the need to kill the driver to eliminate him as a witness. "If you're gonna do it, you're gonna do it right," he reportedly said. Just after the taxi stopped on Brookridge Crescent in Fallingbrook, the 16-year-old looped the wire around Mr. Moussa's neck and pulled him backward. Instead of simply seizing the driver's money, the 18-year-old stabbed him 26 times. Mr. Moussa was able to flee to a nearby house and rang the doorbell before collapsing. The homeowner, Mrs. Aruba Gupta, had been waiting for her teenage son to return from a friend's birthday party. Mr. Moussa's face was covered with so much blood that he was unrecognizable and Mrs Gupta at first assumed that he was her son. Mrs. Gupta and her husband pulled Mr. Moussa inside and called 911. "Am I going to die?" asked Mr. Moussa as Kamlesh Gopal Gupta cradled him in his arms. "I said, 'No. You're in good hands. We'll look after you. Just relax. Nothing's going to happen to you,'" recalled Mr. Gupta. But Mr. Moussa died on the way to hospital. The two killers showed up back at the St. Joseph Boulevard apartment about 45 minutes after they left. The 18-year-old had a shower and changed out of his blood-soaked clothes. He admitted to killing Mr. Moussa, saying to the several teenagers who were present, "when I say something, I do it." One of the teenagers washed the bloody knife. Another witness at the apartment said that the killer handed him a white plastic grocery bag and told him to "throw it out good." This witness, suspecting that the bag contained the bloody clothes, threw it into a restaurant dumpster and immediately returned to the apartment and stayed there for several hours out of fear that he would otherwise be suspected of squealing to the police. By the time he led police to the dumpster the next day the contents were gone. The police had been given a description of the two suspects who entered Mr. Moussa's cab at Place d'Orleans. On the day after the murder when the killers made the mistake of returning to the crime scene on Brookridge Crescent they were recognized and promptly arrested. On Wednesday, February 24, more than 800 drivers crammed into St. Elias Antiochian Orthodox Church for Mr. Moussa's funeral. After the funeral, about 700 cabs joined the funeral procession. A Blue Line dispatcher said that there were no taxis available in suburban Gloucester on the afternoon of the funeral and that cab service in downtown Ottawa was delayed by about 30 minutes. Both the killers were charged with first degree murder. The Crown applied unsuccessfully to have the 16-year-old tried as an adult. In December, 1994, after spending 22 months in pre-trial custody, a judge found the 16-year-old guilty of manslaughter. A defence motion to have him released pending sentencing was turned down. In March, 1995, he was sentenced to a year in a group home and two years probation. The Crown had requested three years in prison, the maximum then allowed under the provisions of the Young Offenders Act. Mr. Moussa's widow and children had already returned to Lebanon before the trial. His brother Samir was disgusted with the judge's decision and reluctant to tell his sister-in-law about it. Samir Moussa had given up cab driving after his brother's murder. "What are we going to say [to Mrs. Moussa]?" he asked. "It stinks. That's all I can say." A week after the sentencing 150 Blue Line cabs descended on Parliament Hill to protest the sentence and to demand that the Young Offenders Act be toughened. The cabs, with pictures of Mr. Moussa taped to their windows, paraded through downtown Ottawa to the Elgin Street Courthouse sounding their horns and disrupting noon-hour traffic. The 18-year-old came to trial in January, 1995. He denied all responsibility for Mr. Moussa's murder, saying that he had agreed to take part in a robbery out of bravado but had no intention of harming anyone. He said he was surprised to find a knife in his pocket, claiming that it must have been planted on him by someone at the apartment. When the knife fell to the floor of the cab, he said, the 16-year-old picked it up and stabbed Mr. Moussa to death. The Crown's case hit a bump when the key prosecution witness admitted to taking LSD before testifying and then consuming three beers when the court adjourned for lunch. Nevertheless, the jury convicted the 18-year-old of second-degree murder. [Next column]

Malek Moussa. (Source: Ottawa Citizen, March 7, 1995, p. A1) In April the 18-year-old, in accordance with the jury's recommendation, was sentenced to life in prison with no parole for at least 15 years. The Crown had requested no parole for 20 years. The killer continued to deny responsibility. "Putting me in the pen won't help me. It will make me become more involved in crime," he said. Mr. Moussa's murder inevitably revived the debate over safety measures for taxi drivers. Mohamad Alsadi, local president of the Ontario Taxi Union, said that more than 18 months earlier the union asked Blue Line to put an emergency warning system in its cabs that would alert dispatchers to trouble, but Blue Line had not responded to the union's request. Mr. Alsadi said the union had approached all the major taxi companies about other proposed safety measures, such as Plexiglas partitions and warning lights, but there had been no response from the companies. "I don't know how many lives it'll take to bring this to the attention of the owners and the government," said Mr. Alsadi. Two smaller Ottawa area companies, Regal and Crown, had actually installed partitions in their cabs in 1986 after a rash of attacks on drivers in Hull (now Gatineau) Québec. "We had no violent attacks in the cab for the first five years," said Gilles Poiriers, whose family owned both companies. Mr. Moussa's name continued to be invoked in the years after his murder whenever the issue of taxi driver safety came up. In 1997 Mary Susan Cardill, a cab driver, brought a proposal for an emergency warning system to the Ottawa Taxi Advisory Committee. The system involved GPS and a camera activated by an emergency button. An overhead video screen would allow companies to sell advertising to help finance the system. However, the Advisory Committee's chair, Sally Burks, said everything possible had been done for the drivers, and she considered the security issue closed. "Blue Line offers in its collective agreement to install shields for any drivers who want them," Ms. Burks said. "But the drivers won't install them because they cut down on the communication with passengers." Ms Cardill, who was also Health and Safety Representative for United Steelworkers Local 1688, said few drivers asked cab companies for security screens because they fear losing their jobs. She also criticized Blue Line's panic button system because although it cleared the dispatchers' computer screens to warn them of trouble, it did not provide a driver's location. Ms Burks said that the best way to discourage robberies would be for passengers to pay by credit card or for taxi companies to bill customers. As far as driver safety was concerned, she noted that the Advisory Committee had already recommended that new drivers take training at Algonquin College on how to avoid customer violence. The courses were to start in the fall of 1997. Ironically, the Algonquin College taxi driver training course was instituted not for driver safety but because the Ottawa Citizen published an article in 1996 on complaints by twelve female Carleton University students that they had been sexually harassed or assaulted by taxi drivers. In 2000 the Citizen published an interview with course manager Brent Rutherford as a companion piece to an article on proposals to "clean up" the Ottawa taxi business by adopting tough regulatory measures such as those initiated by New York mayor Rudy Giuliani. The three-week course covered defensive driving, courtesy toward other drivers and cabbies and map reading. It also required memorizing the nearest street intersections for 300 locations in Ottawa-Carleton and the shortest routes between these locations and all the Queensway on- and off-ramps. Ottawa-Carleton police Staff Sgt. George Savage also provided each class with "'sensitivity training' so they will be polite to customers, especially women." Noting that "The taxi industry has the highest level of homicide of any profession, much higher than even the police," Mr. Rutherford outlined the safety content of the course. "We teach students how to deal with drunk, belligerent customers, fares that won't pay and robberies. We tell them not to wear expensive jewelry or drive forward down a back alley. There is a lot of role playing." Though touted as stressing "personal safety for drivers," the emphasis of the course was clearly on helping drivers deal with the workaday requirements of the job and on enabling them to provide better service to customers. There was precious little in the course to help drivers when murder was on the agenda. "Staff Sgt. Savage said he tells students it isn't worth getting hurt or killed for a $15 fare. He said if Malek Moussa had taken the course, he would have been told to hand over his money instead of arguing with a bandit."