Cabbies

A former prostitute, who was raped, strangled, cut and left for dead in Leakin Park, took the stand Tuesday in Baltimore Circuit Court and tearfully recounted the details of the 2003 attack by an unlicensed "hack" cabdriver whose DNA is linked to two murders. "I felt his arm go around my neck and he started choking me," the 37-year-old woman said, waving her fists behind her head to show how she tried to fight the man off. "My eyes went up in my head, then everything went black." The Baltimore Sun is withholding the woman's name because she is the victim of a sex crime.

A 23-year-old Annapolis man yesterday admitted he used a concrete block to smash a female cab driver in the face in an attack last July in Annapolis.Arthur Lee Brown, of the 100 block Obery Court, pleaded guilty to assault with intent to murder yesterday in county Circuit Court. The victim, Dana McKean, 21, of Annapolis, spent four days in the Maryland Shock Trauma Center at University Hospital in Baltimore after the July 21 attack.Brown called the cab company at about 5 that morning and asked for a female cab driver to take his children to the Newtowne 20 housingdevelopment.

Ted Rubinstein, who drives for Valley Cab, thinks he's heard about 1,000 stories, and almost all of them pretty good. In fact, some of them were classics. He's listened to Dickens, Faulk-ner and the Bronte sisters while driving. You name the story, and Rubinstien has probably heard it."I listen to books on tape because I am not a good reader, never been," he says. "It would probably have taken five of my lifetimes to read what I've heard on tape. I started in 1988 with all the books I'd heard of but never read, what you'd call the classics."

Don Brannan, who runs a taxi and sedan service near the rural-suburban border of Howard and Carroll counties, allows that sometimes it hurts to have an easygoing nature. "Sometimes I have a bad habit of letting things ride," he says. "Like when you drop off someone from the taxi, and they run out on ya without payin' the fare, what're you going to do? I remember a fellow who asked me to drop him off by his mailbox at night so he could pick up his mail, and all I heard was his mailbox openin' and closin' and he disappeared without payin' me. What can you do?"

A cabdriver stabbed to death during an apparent robbery near Pimlico was one of three men killed Thursday night or early yesterday in separate incidents, according to Baltimore police.The body of Lyle Roberts Jr., 56, was found lying beside Diamond Cab No. 31 in the 2900 block of West Belvedere Avenue. Mr. Roberts, father-in-law of attorney and former Circuit Judge William Murphy Jr., had been wounded in the neck and face. He died at the scene.He had been attacked about 2:30 a.m. by a male passenger who was riding in the front seat of his taxi, according to police.

A 12-year-old girl reported being raped yesterday evening by a taxicab driver near Baltimore's Clifton Park, and police were combing the city in search of the vehicle and driver, a police spokesman said. The girl told police she was in a Yellow Cab near Harford Road and East 32nd Street about 6 p.m. when the driver raped her, said Officer Troy Harris, the spokesman. Harris said the girl told police that she hailed the cab. He said the girl, whose clothing was bloodied, was taken for treatment to Johns Hopkins Hospital.

A 24-year-old Baltimore man has been arrested and charged with robbing and shooting a cab driver in Remington early Sunday, police said. Police said Maurice Turner, who in 2008 was sentenced to a 30-year prison term, and a second man robbed and shot a 30-year-old cab driver early Sunday after he pulled into a parking lot in the 2700 block of Sisson St. The suspects demanded money, shot the driver in the back and fled with an unknown amount of...

Samuel Rosado is the sort of cabdriver who takes pride in his work. And that's putting it mildly. When the streets are filled with snow and the air with howling wind, that's when Rosado displays his mettle. Last weekend, he worked right through the storm, he said, and in three days made $1,000. "These roads are really bad," he said Wednesday, in the middle of the second snowstorm in less than a week, as he waited for a fare outside Baltimore's Penn Station. "But since I'm from Buffalo [N.Y.

BARCELONA, Spain -- In no particular order, my top 10 memories of the 1992 Olympics, wacky, wonderful or otherwise:* 1. Those crazy Irish.They sang "Here we go, here we go, here we go," to the tune of "Stars and Stripes Forever," and that was before welterweight Michael Carruth even stepped into the ring.Heaven knows how long the party lasted after Carruth defeated a Cuban for Ireland's first boxing gold medal, and first overall since 1956.Let's just say the Irish were exuberant, apparently having chosen alcohol over sleep.

Driving his cab late at night, Tyrone O. Green ranges the streets unimpeded by traffic. Fewer cabbies compete with him for fares, and he can lay a 50-cent night surcharge on what the meter shows.Night driving can be profitable, but the night exacts a high overhead -- fear of crime.Green, 37, never has been assaulted in 13 years of driving with the Yellow Cab Co. But he has to think about that possibility in every passenger he picks up and in some he passes by as potentially dangerous.Four cab drivers have been shot so far this year, more than in any other year Green can remember.