By Alex Christodoulides
Police and Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials were investigating the death of a Forest Hills man at a friend's home last Thursday after the two had been drinking in the neighborhood.
Responding to a 911 call at about 3:30 p.m., police found a 50-year-old real estate broker, of Forest Hills, with a gunshot wound to the chest at a home on Kessel Street in Forest Hills, an NYPD spokeswoman said. The home belonged to a friend who works for ICE and the gun used belonged to him, according to published reports.
The broker was rushed to North Shore Hospital, where he was pronounced dead, police said.
Police turned the investigation over to ICE after it was determined that the gunshot wound was self-inflicted, an NYPD spokesman said. But the city medical examiner's office said Tuesday that the manner of death was yet to be determined.
There was no answer at ICE's office of public affairs or the office of the agency's principal legal adviser in New York City.
It is not clear why the victim, a broker at a Manhattan firm, would shoot himself. The two men had been drinking at Morrison's Irish Pub on Metropolitan Avenue in Forest Hills for several hours before they headed to the friend's home, where the broker took the ICE agent's gun from the kitchen table and shot himself, according to published reports.
Nobody had yet been arraigned in connection with the incident, the Queens district attorney's office said Monday.
