Olympia taxi driver may have bought dead man his last meal

BY APRIL CHAN | THE OLYMPIAN • Published May 22, 2008

• Comments (0)

Patrick Yirka knows the cash he carries as a taxi driver makes him an easy target for thieves.

The 52-year-old Tumwater resident keeps his doors locked and wears a cap to hide his eyes when he works at night. He leaves a small gap on his passenger-side window to speak to prospective passengers, and he never lets them in to his front seat.

But when a “short-statured” man approached his cab at about 10 p.m. Monday and tried to open his cab door, he was struck by what he sensed was overwhelming sadness and desperation from the man.

“He looked like he had a hard life,” Yirka said today.

The cab driver recalled the man’s gnarled and worn hands and his face that appeared as if he’d been involved in a number of fights in his day.

The man asked when the next bus would arrive, passing Yirka a bus ticket for a 9:05 p.m. bus to San Francisco that he had missed. When Yirka told him the bus already left, the man asked him how much a cab ride would be to Shelton.

He seemed either unwilling or unable to pay the $50 Yirka quoted him but then asked where he might find food.

“He seemed either intoxicated or very tired,” Yirka recalled.

Sensing the man didn’t know his way around and would have to spend the night at the bus station in the cold, Yirka decided to be a Good Samaritan and spend $2.47 of the $12 in his pocket to buy the man a burger, tacos and water from a local Jack in the Box.

The man said he was grateful for the food and walked into one of the bus stalls to eat, Yirka said.

The cab driver pulled into the station again around midnight and said he saw what he thought was an outline of the man under a yellow blanket; he appeared to be sleeping against the wall in one of the bus stalls.

The next time Yirka came back, police were there; crime scene tape encompassed the area.

The man was dead.

A passerby reportedly saw the body and flagged down a car to call police sometime around 2 a.m., Olympia police Cmdr. Tor Bjornstad said.

Police say the man was killed from some type of trauma.