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The young kids of a slain city taxi driver didn’t know their father was dead till after a Sunday press conference — where the oldest ones cried thinking they were mourning someone else, kin told The Post.
Tragic Kutin Gyimah’s 8-year-old daughter, the eldest of his four children, “knew someone was dead since we were wearing black clothing,” said the victim’s brother, Richmond Awuah.
“She asked her mom where her dad was. We told her he went back to Africa, but after the press conference we broke the news to them.”
Awuah, who like his dead brother is from Ghana, explained, “It’s a custom to not tell kids about death when they are very young.”
At the presser, Gyimah’s widow fought through tears as she called on Mayor Eric Adams and the NYPD to catch the five suspects who fatally beat her husband in a botched robbery in Queens early Saturday.
Gyimah, 52, was killed chasing down the suspects after they tried to rob him in Arverne. One of the assailants took a swing at the cabbie — sending him flying to the street, where he cracked his head, police said.
Gyimah’s weeping widow was barely audible Sunday as she struggled to speak.
“I need justice for my husband because he doesn’t deserve to die this way,” Abigail Barwuah said.
In addition to the 8-year-old, the couple has a 7-, 5- and 3-year-old. The two older kids wept during the press conference even though they didn’t know who they were crying for, while the younger pair are too young to understand what is happening, family and friends said.
Barwuah described her late husband as “responsible,” “loving” and “caring” as she stood alongside by more than a dozen relatives, friends and fellow cab drivers.
“He didn’t rest throughout the pandemic — he was working,” the inconsolable widow said. “He was a good, good man. He was my backbone.”
The New York State Federation of Taxi Drivers is offering a $15,000 reward for information leading to the capture of the three men and two women sought in connection with the robbery and fatal attack.
Raphael Barwuah, the victim’s father-in-law who lives with the family, said his daughter works as a nurse’s aid at Montefiore Hospital. He said Gyimah went to work early Saturday, and the family then got a phone call informing them he’d been killed.
The elder Barwuah echoed his daughter’s call for justice, urging Adams and NYPD Commissioner Keechant Sewell to “do what they need to do.”
An accountant in his home country of Ghana, Gyimah came to New York nearly two decades ago and found work driving taxis, said best friend Samuel Ayebi.
Ayebi, 50, said he picked Gyimah up at the airport when he arrived to the US about 18 years ago and introduced him to the taxi business.
“He was very hard working… It’s a very painful loss,” Ayebi said.
‘”His wife is doing so bad. I could never believe something like this could happen — not in our family.”
Additional reporting by David Meyer
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