Raymond Sims' children, grandchildren mourn family patriarch, jitney driver at East Liberty vigil

On June 13, 2023, Cassandra Paul lost her 29-year-old daughter, Tanika, to gun violence.

Sixteen years earlier, she buried her son, Terry Lee, then 19, after he was killed in a home invasion.

On Wednesday night, as wind chilled the air below freezing, the Pittsburgh woman struggled to light candles and help release colorful, star-shaped balloons in a vigil for her father-in-law, Raymond Sims, who was fatally shot Saturday while sitting in his jitney at a busy East Liberty intersection.

“People pull guns; young people pull them in the blink of an eye,” said Paul, 51, as she huddled in a brown winter coat on an unseasonably cold March night with Sims’ children and grandchildren. “It’s tragedy after tragedy. I am so sick of our family standing outside with balloons.”

Sims, who died Saturday at age 70, grew up in Chicago’s South Side, his family said. He proudly lived at 4331 South State St. in the Robert Taylor Homes: a cluster of 28 buildings, each more than a dozen stories high, which at one point was the largest housing project in the nation.

In Chicago, for reasons lost to time, Sims was minted with nickname “Rainbow.”

“Or Bowski,” one of his daughters laughed Thursday. “Or The Big Bow.”

After relocating to Pittsburgh, “Rainbow” settled in the city’s Garfield neighborhood, married a woman named Mary, and raised seven children as he drove a jitney service.

Laticsha Adams — whose mother married Sims in the mid-80s when Laticsha was about 10 or 11 — never called Sims her stepfather.

“He was Dad — he raised us,” said Adams, 50, a Peabody High School alumna who today is a baker and lives in Pittsburgh’s South Hills.

Adams helped Sims bury his wife of nearly 30 years in 2012 after she lost a hard-fought battle with cancer.

“It’s a little harder this time because he was murdered,” said Adams, as family planted plastic flowers and laid a gray stone bearing the word “Peace” near the Penn Avenue curb where Sims sat in his Kia before the shooting.

“It wasn’t cancer or something, where you’re going through the motions,” she said. “He died on the scene. He was gone. And we never got the chance to say goodbye.”

“It’s heartbreaking, to lose him,” added Loretta Adams, at 54 the eldest of Sims’ five living children. Sims lost one of his seven children to covid-19 and a second one to diabetes, the family said.

Sims lived — and expressed himself — through his jitney service, his family said. He took pride in giving Pittsburghers rides to and from the supermarket or elsewhere — even as many East End jitney stations started to disappear in recent years.

He had a steady clientele and often serenaded his riders by singing, his family said.

Sims had a soft spot for “oldies but goodies” — particularly The Whispers, a Los Angeles-bred vocal group whose hit records started in the 1960s, and The O’Jays, an R&B group who went on to storm Philadelphia’s soul scene.

“If he couldn’t sing, he’d sing anyway,” Laticsha laughed. “The women? Oh, they loved him! They loved him!”

Though Sims kept driving the jitney through his 60s, he was witnessing the changes of his senior years, and recently started having problems with his legs. But it didn’t slow him down much.

“He was a good man, he was a good man,” Loretta said. “He was good to us and to a lot of people in this neighborhood.”

Little is known to the public about the man that shot Sims.

Witnesses told police a man dressed in black hurried up Penn Avenue from the nearby Target department store and shot into Sims’ vehicle from the passenger side. Then, he fled.

First responders found Sims with multiple gunshot wounds in the head and neck at about 4:20 p.m., according to the Allegheny County Medical Examiner’s Office. He was dead at the scene.

Pittsburgh police have told Sims’ family they’re reviewing footage from multiple cameras in East Liberty’s business district. Police have not specified if they’re city- or privately owned cameras.

Two gray surveillance cameras perched over the vigil Thursday, mounted above a sign for the abandoned Anthon’s Bakery and Restaurant, the family pointed out.

As family members gestured toward the cameras — one angled toward a bus stop, one toward the curb outside the nearby Dollar Tree store — they expressed frustration with a police investigation that has yet to bear fruit.

“All this technology right now you have, and you don’t know where this (shooter) went?” Paul, the daughter-in-law, said. “He was a human being. Whether he’s got five cents or $5 million, you’ve got to investigate every case.”

As wind gusts repeatedly blew out candles and lighters, some mourners from the crowd about 20 people popped into Dollar Tree and bought battery-operated ones.

Their orange, plastic flames glowed in the early evening night.

At about 8 p.m., Laticsha Adams ended the vigil with an impromptu prayer, thanking God and asking them to give her family strength and to hold them together.

“Please Lord, give us justice,” Adams said, in closing. “We need you right now.”

She then turned to one of her sisters.

“It’s hard,” she said. “But we’re going to get through this.”