Friends gathered Friday at the South Side home of Chinedu Lambert Madu, the 51-year-old cab driver slain Thursday, in the hopes of finding a way to help the family he left behind.
“It’s one of the saddest moments you can think of,” said Madu's uncle Prince Nwadindu. “I was at his house at 5 p.m. [yesterday], and then he was killed just like that.”
Madu came to Chicago from Nigeria. He had been driving a cab for more than a decade before he was killed by a gunshot wound to the chest, in what police say was an apparent armed robbery on the 1200 block of South Albany Avenue.
“He was a very, very hard-working young man who loved his family,” Madu’s friend Longinus Obasi said.
Madu was working to support both his family in Chicago and Nigeria, his relatives said.
“He has to send money home. That’s why he had to work,” said friend Christopher Anaele. “That cost him his life, because he needed the money.”
Now members of Chicago’s close-knit Nigerian community are coming together to figure out who will support his wife and son here, as well as his parents and brother and sister in Nigeria.
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“We don’t know what to do,” Anaele said. “Where do you start? Where do you start to patch [things back together]? He had a 5-year-old son. We don’t know what to do.”
Chicago Carriage Cab, the company Madu worked for, called his murder a tragedy.
“We hope that whoever was responsible for his murder will be apprehended quickly,” Chicago Carriage Cab’s chief operating officer said in a statement.
Madu leaves behind a wife and his 5-year-old son.
Police have one suspect in custody. Further investigation is ongoing.
