Body Of Sheila Abdus-Salaam, Black Judge Was Just Found Floating In A River

[tero]

how is this not blowing up on the internet yet ??? smh ppl still talking about united airlines yo

 

[SC kid]

This is crazy. RIP

 

[jjs07]

Article doesn't even expand on the "struggling with depression" piece. It just says that then moves on.

That's why I had to screen shot what I saw on the front page of the NYDN website.

 

[AEA18]

Depression?

Not buying that.

 

[a blinkin]

I'm not going for that ********.

 

[sonoftony]

I don't understand how can one be depressed if you're as successful as she was?

 

[ill steelo]

Don't believe it.

 

[Mark Antony]

I don't understand how can one be depressed if you're as successful as she was?

To be fair depression has nothing to do with success.

 

[jjs07]

My aunt, who is a retired Dr./professor, was just diagnosed with depression a few weeks back. She had some stuff going on, but that was the last thing we suspected. You just never know what people are truly dealing with on the surface. There are SO many high-functioning, BRILLIANT people out there who suffer from some sort of mental illness.

 

[Bert.]

I don't understand how can one be depressed if you're as successful as she was?

Anyone can be depressed lol

There's filthy rich people who are depressed. Has nothing to do with wealth and success. It comes randomly and from all kinds of other ****

 

[ninjahood]

judges with everything to live for? 

millionaires even.

 

[numbah1grimey]

She made a living off putting people in prison and whatnot, that has to play on your conscious. Eventually, it comes to ahead.

 

[a blinkin]

She made a living off putting people in prison and whatnot, that has to play on your conscious. Eventually, it comes to ahead.

I used to work for judges here in Georgia and I sat through a few sentencings. Once saw a man get 100+ years for molesting his own child. It may play on their conscience, but the rational way of thinking is that these people have been proven to be guilty of doing something so heinous that they cannot be allowed in open society any longer. Not putting them away means that they will continue to live among us and possibly partake in more acts that are detrimental to the societal balance. That's heavy stuff, but I get it.

I don't doubt that she, or any judge for that matter, could be under mental distress. But the circumstances surrounding her death leads me to believe that there was some sort of foul play involved.

 

[hand2handking]

the next step for her would have been supreme court correct? 

 

[22stylez]

Fargo season 2?

 

[360waves]

RIP I hate to jump the gun and assume anything but something isnt adding up with this story. I hope her and her family get justice/ some form of peace

 

[bigty23]

the next step for her would have been supreme court correct? 

Yep, alot of politics goes into taking that step, like waiting for a space to open and being nominated but yea.

Its a shame...

 

[hand2handking]

[h1]Mystery and Melancholy Surround Death of Judge Found in the Hudson[/h1]
By ALAN FEUER and WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM APRIL 13, 2017

The last time someone heard from Judge Sheila Abdus-Salaam apparently was on Tuesday when she called her chambers in the Graybar Building in Manhattan to say she wasn’t well and would not be coming in. At some point, she had left her apartment in Harlem, law enforcement officials said, departing without her wallet and cellphone, and locking the door behind her.

When Judge Abdus-Salaam — the first black woman to serve on New York State’s highest court — failed to appear at work on Wednesday, her assistant grew concerned and contacted her husband, who reported her missing, the law enforcement officials said. Then that afternoon, there was a terrible discovery: The judge’s body floating, fully clothed and with no apparent signs of trauma, in the Hudson River.

The unexpected death was shocking and saddening and even set off some suspicions among Judge Abdus-Salaam’s friends and colleagues, many of whom said she had given no indication that anyone — including herself — would want to do her harm.

In the hours after her body was found, the police said they were treating her death as a suicide. The judge, 65, had recently told friends and a doctor that she was suffering from stress. 

But by Thursday afternoon, investigators had reached no clear conclusion, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the investigation was continuing. The medical examiner’s office said that “the cause and manner of death were pending further studies”; police detectives were looking for surveillance video along her possible path to see if it revealed her movements, and whether or not it supported the theory that she had walked into the river.

When officers from the Police Department’s Harbor Unit pulled the judge’s body from the water near West 132nd Street on Wednesday afternoon, she was wearing a T-shirt, a sweater, sweatpants and sneakers, one of the officials said. She also wore a watch and had a MetroCard in her pocket.

“We’re all just shocked,” said Jonathan Lippman, a former chief judge of New York State who had served with her on the Court of Appeals. “No one has any idea what happened.”

Since 2013, Judge Abdus-Salaam had been one of seven judges on the high court. Before that, she served for about four years with the First Appellate Division of the State Supreme Court, and for 15 years as a State Supreme Court justice in Manhattan. She was previously a lawyer in the state attorney general’s office.

Judge Abdus-Salaam was known for her steadfast liberal voice, regularly siding with immigrants, the poor, and people with mental illnesses against established interests. She also leaned toward injured parties who brought claims of fraud or misconduct against wealthy corporations.

She was admired by her colleagues for her thoughtfulness, candor and finely crafted writing style. And she was not one to use her decisions as a soapbox even when they set precedents.

Judge Abdus-Salaam lived part time on 131st Street, on a block filled with brownstones that two or three decades ago was in dire straits. “My family was here during the Reagan crack era, and she was here when it was worse,” said Todd Milner, a 47-year-old filmmaker who has lived near the judge for more than 20 years. “That says a lot about her.”

“For someone who had the type of power she was entrusted with, she was so humble,” Mr. Milner said.

Sean Johnson, who does maintenance for buildings on the block, still carries with him a two-year-old note from Judge Abdus-Salaam saying, “Thanks for keeping my property clean.”

“It made me feel good that she cared,” Mr. Johnson, 50, said, adding that he had seen the judge last week and had noticed nothing wrong. “She was her normal self,” he said. “A very nice lady.”

Like Mr. Johnson, many of Judge Abdus-Salaam’s friends and colleagues said they could not believe that she had killed herself, and investigators have not produced a suicide note. Steve Younger, a lawyer who knew the judge for 15 years, said he spoke with her last week when he asked if she could give a speech to his bar association.

“She was totally upbeat, planning her summer vacation,” Mr. Younger recalled.

And yet, other close friends, like Marilyn Mobley, an official at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, said that Judge Abdus-Salaam had a heavy caseload and was in demand as a speaker and may have had trouble handling the pressure.

“What she shared with me is she had been under a lot of stress recently and that she was having trouble sleeping,” said Dr. Mobley, who saw her friend for breakfast in New York two weeks ago. “The truth is she was accomplished, resilient and strong, and she had a breaking point like everyone else. I fear it got there.”

Judge Abdus-Salaam was a cancer survivor, two officials said, but was not currently under treatment. She had visited her doctor on Monday, one official said, and told the physician that she had been “stressed with the demands of work” and “not spending enough time with her husband.”

Raised in Washington as one of seven children in a poor family, Judge Abdus-Salaam earned her law degree at Columbia University in 1977. She was married three times, most recently eight months ago to Gregory Jacobs, an Episcopal pastor. She divided her time between Albany and Harlem, though Mr. Jacobs kept a separate residence in Newark. (Her name led to confusion about whether or not she was Muslim. Gary Spencer, a spokesman for the Court of Appeals, said she had told him that she was not.)

After law school, Judge Abdus-Salaam became a public defender in Brooklyn and then served as an assistant attorney general in the Civil Rights Bureau of the state attorney general’s office. In one of her first cases, she won an anti-discrimination suit for more than 30 female New York City bus drivers who had been denied promotions.

Last summer, Judge Abdus-Salaam wrote an important decision, in the Matter of Brooke S.B. v. Elizabeth A.C.C., that expanded the definition of what it means to be a parent. For 25 years, the court had held that the nonbiological parent in a same-sex couple had no standing to seek custody or visitation rights after a breakup.

But that, Judge Abdus-Salaam wrote, had become “unworkable when applied to increasingly varied familial relationships.” In a tightly reasoned decision, she wrote that nonbiological parents did have standing to seek custody if they showed “by clear and convincing evidence that all parties agreed to conceive a child and to raise the child together.”

In an interview in 2014 about black history, Judge Abdus-Salaam said that she had become interested in her family’s history as a young girl in public school and that her research had led her to discover that her great-grandfather was a slave in Virginia.

“All the way from Arrington, Va., where my family was the property of someone else, to my sitting on the highest court of the State of New York is amazing and huge,” she said. “It tells you and me what it is to know who we are and what we can do.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/13/...ork-judge-hudson-river-committed-suicide.html

 

[hand2handking]

[h1]Death of first female US Muslim judge being treated as ‘suspicious’ by police[/h1]
Sheila Abdus-Salaam was found dead in New York’s Hudson River 

Loulla-Mae Eleftheriou-Smith 

Judge Sheila Abdus-Salaam, associate judge of the Court of Appeals, who was found dead in New York's Hudson River Reuters

New York police are now treating the death of America’s first female Muslim judge as “suspicious,” six days after her body was found in the Hudson River.

Sheila Abdus-Salaam, 65, was the first African-American woman to serve on New York’s Court of Appeals and the first Muslim woman to serve as a US judge. 

Her body was found floating in three feet of water near Manhattan’s west side on Wednesday afternoon last week. She had last spoken to her husband at 7pm on Monday and spoken to her assistant on Tuesday.

Police said at the time that Ms Abdus-Salaam’s body was found fully clothed and showed no obvious signs of trauma. Her death was initially treated as a suicide, with one law enforcement official stating that both the judge’s mother and brother had died in recent years around Easter. Her brother had taken his own life.

Investigators are now treating her death as suspicious, adding that there is no “clear indication” of criminality or suicide.

“We’re looking at it as a suspicious death at this point. We haven’t found any clear indications of criminality, but at this point we can’t say for sure. We’re hoping if anyone could shed any light into the hours before her disappearance, it would help us establish what happened,” NYPD spokesman Stephen Davis told ABC7NY. 

The New York Police Department tweeted a public appeal notice asking anyone with information to contact the 26th Precinct Detective Squad.

Investigators are studying surveillance video footage from shops and residential buildings to try and piece together Ms Abdus-Salaam’s last movements, the New York Post reported. 

The newspaper cited sources as saying there had been no signs of forced entry or a struggle at the judge’s Harlem apartment. They also said the autopsy found water in her lungs and slight bruising around her neck, but her eyes did not show the type of bleeding associated with strangulation. Official autopsy results have not yet been released.

Ms Abdus-Salaam graduated from Barnard College and received her law degree from Columbia Law School. 

She started her career as a staff attorney for East Brooklyn Legal Services and later served as a judge on the Manhattan state Supreme Court for 14 years. She was appointed to New York state’s Court of Appeals in 2013.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/w...-muslim-judge-suspicious-police-a7690866.html

 

[SC kid]

This should be more important than arron hernandez

 

[a blinkin]

Yeah. This isn't getting the attention it deserves.

 

[Tony $now]

Something not adding up. RIP to the lady. Hopefully we get real answers

 

[oh you mad]

View media item 2409432

 

[hand2handking]

[h1]Husband of Dead New York Judge Pleads for Help After Cops Call Case ‘Suspicious’[/h1]
by CORKY SIEMASZKO

The husband of a trailblazing New York judge who was found floating in the Hudson River last week appealed to the public Wednesday for help in unraveling the mystery of how she died.

The Rev. Gregory Jacobs also pushed back strongly against reports that Judge Sheila Abdus-Salaam, the first African-American woman to sit on New York State's highest court, "was the victim of a 'probable suicide.'"

Justice Sheila Abdus-Salaam looks on as members of the state Senate Judiciary Committee vote unanimously to advance her nomination to fill a vacancy on the Court of Appeals at the Capitol in Albany on April 30, 2013. Mike Groll / AP file

"These reports have frequently included unsubstantiated comments concerning my wife's possible mental and emotional state of mind at the time of her death," Jacobs, who is a minister at the Episcopal Diocese of Newark, wrote in a statement. "Those of us who loved Sheila and knew her well do not believe that these unfounded conclusions have any basis in reality."

Abdus-Salaam, her widower wrote, "loved Harlem and its people and lived there for nearly all of her adult life."

"I now join with the NYPD in asking anyone in the neighborhood to step forward with any information that might help us determine what may have happened during those hours before her death," the priest pleaded.

Canon's first public comments on the 65-year-old judge's death came a week after Abdus-Salaam was found in the waters off of Manhattan. She was dressed in sweats, had a MetroCard in her pocket, and police said her body showed no obvious signs of trauma.

The NYPD has characterized the circumstances surrounding the death of Abdus-Salaam as "suspicious in nature." But neither the police nor Medical Examiner has established how she died.

The judge's extended family also weighed-in on Abdus-Salaam, who was born Sheila Turner and who was widely hailed as the nation's first female Muslim judge.

"Sheila has not been a practicing Muslim for the past 20 years," the Turner Family said in their statement. "She continued to use her first husband's surname professionally. We will forever remember witnessing her happiness as she united in marriage to an Episcopal priest last year."

Sharif Abdus-Salaam has not returned several phone calls from NBC News for comment about his ex-wife.

The Turner Family also took aim at reports that Abdus-Salaam's mother and brother had also committed suicide.

"Sheila's mother, the matriarch of our family who died at age 92 in 2012, did not take her own life," their statement read. "Shelia's younger brother, who died in 2014, lost his battle with terminal lung cancer."

Abdus-Salaam started serving on the New York Supreme Court in 1994. Then in 2009, Gov. David Paterson appointed her associate justice to the New York Appellate Division of the Supreme Court.

In 2013, Gov. Andrew Cuomo nominated her to fill a vacancy on the New York Court of Appeals and praised her "deep understanding of the everyday issues facing New Yorkers."

And after the state Senate confirmed her nomination, Abdus-Salaam received a standing ovation.

http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/husband-dead-new-york-judge-pleads-help-after-cops-call-n748411

 

[TURBO UNO]

Depression is no joke. Hope this wasn't foul play though.


Rest in peace.