When he was a child, Javan Boyd's mother and siblings died in a fire, and now he's been shot and killed.
Boyd had only been on the job as a livery driver for three weeks when he was shot. He drove his own vehicle, which was unmarked and therefore not fully identifiable as a cab. Police are not sure whether the motive was a robbery.
His family made an appeal Sunday night for anyone with information about the shooting to come forward.
"I just want justice," said Trina Boyd, Javan's aunt. "Whoever did it. Somebody come forward. That's all I'm asking for."
It was just about 4 a.m. Saturday, when livery driver Boyd was shot and killed while waiting on a fare in McKinley Park. By the time the woman he was to have picked up arrived it was too late. Police say the shooter approached from the vehicle's passenger side hitting him in the back and legs.
"We're distraught, and we don't have any answers," said Derrick Hardman.
Though he had worked with them before, Boyd had only resumed his job as a driver with Pershing Livery in the last few weeks. Dispatcher Gennetta Parks says this is the first time any of their drivers has been hurt.
"We service the whole South Side, West Side. Where other companies won't go, we will," she said. "But from now on we won't have any additional drivers go to that area."
Only 28 years old, his family says Boyd, who'd been in trouble when he was younger, had turned his life around in recent years and currently worked two jobs to make ends meet.
"This boy worked a majority, 14 to 16 hours, almost a day to feed his family and go back home. And want to be back home with his fiancee," Hardman said.
His was a life already marred by tragedy. On June 2, 1994 an apartment fire in the now defunct Robert Taylor Homes killed all of Boyd's immediate family. He was the only one of his siblings old enough to go to school, that is what saved him. It was his mother's sister, who survived the fire along with her infant daughter, who raised him as her own after that.
"He was my baby boy. He means everything," Trina Boyd said.
Police said nobody is in custody and the investigation is ongoing.
