NEW YORK, (Reuters) – Before she started working at the Sofitel hotel in New York’s bustling Times Square area, the maid who accused IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn of trying to rape her spent her daily life within the same few city blocks.
The neighbourhood where she lived and worked, a section of the Bronx lined with tiny grocers, hair salons and dollar stores, once infamously violent, is a hilly place called Concourse just north of Yankee Stadium.
There, the single mother and widow from Guinea used to work an evening shift in a tiny takeout joint, African American Restaurant, located on the corner of a busy intersection. She lived with her daughter; most recently in an apartment building just 12 blocks away.
“She helped my wife,” said the restaurant’s owner, Bahoreh Jabbie, 60, who said he hired her after she came into the restaurant and asked his wife, Fatima, for help finding a job.
“She walked by herself when she came and she walked by herself when she left,” he said, “I never saw her taking a free ride from nobody.”
Jabbie, who immigrated to New York from Gambia and has run the restaurant since 2002, said he knew little of the woman’s life outside the restaurant, but that her daughter would come in occasionally to buy something.
