On the evening of April 6, 2005, 56-year-old Neville Bailey was making the rounds in his taxi on the city’s west side.
It was a cool, overcast early evening. At his home on Flint Street, his wife Jeanette watched over their two daughters, D’Asia, 7, and Jennell, 6. Bailey had started driving the cab after being laid off from Kodak in the late ’90s, partly because it allowed one parent to always watch the kids. Jeanette worked days, Neville worked nights.
Shortly before 9 p.m., a woman called Bailey’s company, Associate Taxi, from a pay phone on Lake Avenue near Emerson Street requesting a pick-up, according to Rochester police. The first driver dispatched couldn’t take it, nor could the second. The fare eventually landed with Bailey.
What happened next is a mystery. What is known is that, at 9 p.m., Bailey was found unresponsive in the driver’s seat of his taxi on Newbury Street, a dead-end road in the industrial center of the city’s west side, about two miles from where he picked up the fare. He had been shot once in the chest and crashed his taxi into a boulder on the side of the road.
He would later die at Strong Memorial Hospital.
“This is really a whodunit type thing,” said Tom Cassidy, a Rochester Police Department detective who has worked Bailey’s homicide for 18 years. “This is not one where we’re at the edge.”
Dead ends on a dead-end road
Cassidy estimated he’s investigated around 200 homicides in Rochester during his 25 years on the job. In most of them, there was some lead to go on: a witness, an ongoing dispute involving the victim, evidence at the scene.
But Bailey’s slaying had none of those. His killing was seemingly that of the rarest kind: a random act of violence.
The best lead investigators had was a pack of cigarettes and a cigarette butt in Bailey’s cab. But tests on them for DNA and fingerprints turned up nothing consequential.
“They could’ve been there a week, a month, we don’t know if it’s from his murder,” Cassidy said. “...The two items of evidence out of the cab led us to people who were regular cab riders, and they didn’t have any kind of history of robberies or murders, and no association with Neville Bailey or anything.”
Cassidy believes that Bailey was a victim of circumstance who was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Even theories that his killing was a robbery gone wrong are, best, speculative. Nothing of value seemed to be taken from the scene. Bailey still had cash and jewelry on him when he was found. A small, silver revolver he carried for protection was found wedged between the front seats.
Who would want to kill Bailey, a Jamaican immigrant and married father of two?
Investigators questioned his family members. The Arborwood Apartment complex near the crime scene was screened for people who may have been involved with robberies in the past. The payphone on Lake Avenue was so heavily used that tests on it for forensic evidence were useless.
The last report investigators filed on the Bailey case was dated Sept. 26, 2005, about six months after the slaying. No leads have surfaced since.
“There’s a good chance that whoever the fare was had nothing to do with it either, it just led him to the place where he was,” Bailey said. “So, if that fare got dropped over at that apartment complex, and he (Bailey) just stopped there to catch up on his log and do his paperwork, and someone just walked up to him, I think that’s probably the most likely thing that happened.”
‘The love of my life’
Jeanette Bailey stood over her husband’s grave at Mt. Hope Cemetery on a recent fall day and recalled the first time she set eyes on him.
She was 18 and “young, crazy, and wild,” and sitting on her mother’s porch. Neville Bailey was visiting his brother across the street. He was older — 14 years her senior to be exact — but she was instantly smitten, entranced by his smile and Jamaican accent.
The attraction was mutual and, as she told it, they soon “never left each other alone.”
“He was, to me, the best thing that ever happened to me,” Jeanette said.
The couple waited 10 years to get married. Neville wanted things settled before starting a family — buy a home, build a nest egg, and, as Jeanette put it, to be sure she was the right one.
Jeanette never had any doubt.
“He was my guardian angel, the love of my life,” Jeanette said, choking back tears. “And they didn’t have to kill him.”
The night of Bailey was killed, Jeanette received a phone call from Strong Memorial Hospital from someone who told her husband had been in a car accident. When she arrived at the hospital, a social worker explained that Bailey was shot and killed.
In that moment, she recalled, “everything went blank.”
The loss of her husband was not the first tragedy for Jeanette Bailey.
In 1986, the Baileys’ first child, a son they named Neville Jr., died in childbirth. He was interred at Mt. Hope Cemetery. The boy’s remains were later exhumed and buried in the same plot as his father. A pink headstone marks their resting place.
“He cried,” Jeanette said of her husband the day their son died. “I’ve never seen him cry, but he cried that day. He didn’t even cry when his mother passed.”
Jeanette described her husband as a kind, hardworking man whose only vices were enjoying a cold beer and listening to reggae at the end of a long day—Bob Marley and Jimmy Cliff being at the top of his soundtrack.
As a father, she said, he was the “cool dad.”
“When I came home from work, they’d be tearing up the house, they’re having good times, they’re doing all kinds of stuff,” Jeanette said. “As soon as I come, the kids look at me like, ‘Oh lord, the fun is over, isn’t it?’”
Jeanette said Bailey’s death traumatized their daughters.
“I’ve never been the same, and my kids haven’t either,” she said.
Today, Jeanette has a singular goal in life: to see the case of her husband’s slaying solved.
“Why did you take someone from us, our love?” she said. “What did he do to deserve this?”
On holidays, Jeanette visits Bailey’s grave with her daughters. Every time she drives up Mt. Hope, she waves to him. She believes he still watches over her as her guardian angel.
But nearly 20 years on, there is a lack of closure.
“His clothes are still in my closet, his underwear is still there,” Bailey said. “I haven’t moved anything. Everybody’s telling me to let it go, but I’m not ready for it.”
“I don’t want to let it go,” she continued. “I just turned 60. He should have seen me when I turned 60. He should have been here with me and the girls.”
If you have information about the death of Neville Bailey, please contact the RPD's Major Crimes Unit at 585-428-7157 or majorcrimes@cityofrochester.gov, or WXXI News reporter Gino Fanelli at 585-775-9692 or gfanelli@wxxi.org.
For more in this series:
