Jan. 4--The holidays were not happy for LeeAnn Hosseini.

Seven months after her husband, Vahid, 47, was shot outside a Bank of the West on South First Street in San Jose, she could barely stand to see families happily shopping for holiday meals or older couples growing gray together.

"I get hit all the time where I just have to go to my car and cry," LeeAnn Hosseini said. "It feels like I'm getting hit by a two-by-four."

Since the death of the popular 47-year-old shopkeeper and mosque president, San Jose police haven't said much about who they think shot Hosseini on May 23 as he walked toward his Lexus in the bank's parking lot, carrying $50,000 in cash in a canvas tote bag. As was his regular Friday afternoon routine, Hosseini needed the bills to cash checks for his store's predominantly Latino customers, many of whom don't have traditional bank accounts. The store, Willow Market, is about a quarter mile away from where he died.

All that's been released publicly so far is a general witness account of several people seen in a silver or gray compact sport-utility vehicle speeding up near the bank, and one person in a black-hooded sweatshirt shooting Hosseini in the back of the head before making off with the money.

Hosseini, who also was a leader at the South Bay's largest Shia mosque, died at the hospital June 3.

It was there, that LeeAnn Hosseini, 44, remembers a bank employee calling her to ask her to sign a document

saying the financial institution wasn't responsible for what had happened.

"I thought it was really callous," Hosseini said. "How dare they?"

After she buried her husband in traditional Islamic fashion, she and her daughters, Alexandra, 21, and Cassandra, 26, and father-in-law, Kamaldien, decided to sue the Bank of the West -- the same bank that's put up a $10,000 reward to find her husband's killers.

The October lawsuit filed in Santa Clara County Superior Court asks for unspecified damages, claiming that the San Francisco-based bank should have had security cameras and guards posted at the bank. The suit states that the same branch had been robbed at least six times from March 2006 to March 2008 and therefore should have "reasonably anticipated" another similar crime to occur again.

Knowing the bank's history, Hosseini told the Mercury News, might not have prevented her husband from driving back to his shop with so many loose bills, but it might have made him take along friends or store employees to accompany him.

Hosseini's attorney, Robert Allard, said a private investigator came up with the number of bank robberies stated in the suit.