He wasn’t a celebrity like Jussie Smollett. He didn’t have important friends in politics or in Hollywood.
Anis Tungekar was a just a hard-working Chicago cabdriver, a Pakistani immigrant and proud American citizen.
He liked strong, sweet coffee, but he wouldn’t go to Starbucks because he thought it too expensive. He liked steak, but never went to a steakhouse. He didn’t eat his lunch in restaurants. He didn’t like spending on himself because he was a husband and father with bills.
All his money went to his family, to pay off the house, and get his sons into top private high schools, one to St. Ignatius and the other to Latin School, and then send them on to college. He drove his cab in the town where the politicians never stop talking about their love for immigrants in this city of immigrants.
“My father would never have a Starbucks because he thought it was a waste of money,” his son Omar, a corporate communications executive in New York, told me the other day. “So, I bought him a caramel macchiato and he was thrilled. He loved it. And the next time I was coming home, I was going to take him to a steakhouse for a steak.”
But they never did get that steak.
Because on Sept. 2, 2018, in broad daylight, in downtown Chicago, with witnesses present and a security video capturing it all, Anis Tungekar was killed. His family says it was murder.
Tungekar never saw it coming. He was kicked in the back of the head by an Uber driver, a
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