It’s impossible to say whether Tekola Bekele, the D.C. cab driver shot to death last week in an apparent carjacking, might have saved himself had he carried a handgun in his taxi.
But Bekele had no weapon; D.C. officials say taxi drivers still are barred from keeping a firearm. That legal interpretation stands, they said, even under recently amended laws — adopted in response to the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that overturned the city’s handgun ban — that allow registrants to keep a firearm in their “place of business.”
“The chief [of police] and the District are interpreting the ‘place of business’ to be a fixed location,” Leslie Kershaw, spokeswoman for Mayor Adrian Fenty, said Friday.
Place of business, in the law, is undefined.
More than three-quarters of the District’s nearly 7,000 cabs are independently owned and operated, said Nathan Price, chairman of the D.C. Coalition of Taxicab Drivers. Violence comes in waves, he said, but driver-owners are not sufficiently shielded.
“If the city cannot protect you, and the city does a poor job of protection, then it should be your right under the Constitution to carry a gun to protect yourself,” Price said.
Driving a cab is widely considered one of the world’s most dangerous occupations, but self-protection laws vary.
Virginia drivers must have a concealed weapons permit to keep a gun in a glove compartment or under the seat, but otherwise the Old Dominion is open-carry. Maryland requires a permit.
New York City Yellow Cab drivers are prohibited from carrying any weapon, and no driver has been murdered there since 1997. A Pittsburgh cab driver, licensed to carry a firearm, fatally shot a passenger who tried to rob him in March.
The effect of armed taxi drivers is unclear.
“People who got guns, it’s not like on TV,” said Leon Swain, chairman of the D.C. Taxicab Commission and a former police officer who still carries a gun. “You get 100th of a second to make a decision.”
Christian Brooks, 25, is accused of pulling Bekele from his taxi around 11:20 p.m. Wednesday in Prince George’s County and shooting him to death. Brooks was arrested Thursday and charged with first-degree murder.
Roy D. Spooner, general manager of D.C. Yellow Cab, said taxi drivers “are putting their lives on the line every day.” If the law allows a driver to carry a weapon, he said, “That’s their right.”
A Yellow Cab driver was robbed at gunpoint Thursday night, Spooner said. He was not harmed.
“People do all sorts of things to cab drivers,” Spooner said. “That’s why the fleet goes down so much at night.”
