This is getting bizarre. An unidentified NYPD police officer killed himself by gunshot behind the Staten Island precinct building today.
And he’s the third of the department to commit suicide in the last nine days.
From the New York Post:
The officer was found inside of a vehicle on Wilcox St., behind the 121st Precinct with an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound just before 4 p.m., the sources said. He was pronounced dead at the scene.
Sources described the cop as a domestic violence officer with 7 years on the job. He was off duty when he took his life.
Very sad. Law enforcement officers have among the highest rates of suicide, likely because they have to deal with the worst aspects of our society.
But this makes it sound like there’s something even more sinister happening:
His death comes just one week after NYPD officials urged department members to speak up and seek treatment for any mental health issues — following the suicides of two veteran officers.
Homicide detective Joe Calabrese, 58, was found dead last Thursday of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound at Brooklyn’s Plumb Beach. Steven Silks, the deputy chief of Patrol Borough Queens North, took his own life in a similar manner a day earlier. The 62-year-old was found just blocks away from his office at the 112th Precinct station house in Forest Hills.
Following those suicides, Chief of Department Terence Monahan said in a video posted to his Twitter account: “We’ve lost two of our members of service due to suicide and this is something we have to talk about. This isn’t something that we can just keep in whispered tones and not have the conversation…This has to be open. We need everyone in this agency to be willing to talk about this.”
That is alarming. It could be that one was close to the brink and hearing of a cop suicide pushes them over the edge. But whatever the reasoning is, let’s hope and pray that it stops.
Here’s a video from after the second suicide: