The investigator was identified as Jorge Sanchez, 53, of Suffolk…
By Jennifer Warren
A senior investigator of racketeering fatally shot himself in the head while in the Queens district attorney’s office Tuesday morning at 80-02 Kew Gardens Road, a DA spokeswoman said.
The investigator was identified as Jorge Sanchez, 53, of Suffolk County, a police detective who had worked in District Attorney Richard Brown’s office since his retirement from the force in 1998.
Mary de Bourbon, a spokeswoman for the DA, said “nobody knows why” Sanchez apparently committed suicide.
“Detective Sanchez had a tremendous capacity for work and brought with him keen intelligence and great compassion,” Brown said Tuesday. “He was never daunted by his mission. He had an extraordinary ability to console and comfort the most traumatized crime victim and to coax and care for the most reluctant witness.”
Sanchez had served as a detective first grade in the Queens Homicide and Special Victims Squads during his years on the police force.
During that time, Sanchez worked on such high-profile cases as the multiple College Point murders in 1995 and the killing of journalist Manuel de Dios Unanue in 1992 in a Jackson Heights bar after he published a photo of a Colombian drug lord in El Diario – La Prensa, Newsday reported.
In the last six months Sanchez worked as the liaison between the district attorney’s office and the family of Ramon Nazario, one of the fast-food employees killed in last year’s Wendy’s massacre in Flushing, The New York Times reported.
He was recently assigned to the district attorney’s Domestic Violence Bureau.
Sanchez is survived by his wife and three adult children.
