Sheila Abdus-Salaam, Judge on New York’s Top Court, Is Found Dead in Hudson River

By Matthew Haag and William K. Rashbaum

Sheila Abdus-Salaam, an associate judge on New York State’s highest court and the first African-American woman to serve on that bench, was found dead on Wednesday in the Hudson River, the authorities said.

Officers with the New York Police Department’s Harbor Unit responded about 1:45 p.m. to a report of a person floating by the shore near West 132nd Street in Upper Manhattan. Judge Abdus-Salaam, 65, was taken to a pier on the Hudson River and was pronounced dead by paramedics shortly after 2 p.m.

The police were investigating how she ended up in the river, and it was not clear how long Judge Abdus-Salaam, who lived nearby in Harlem, had been missing. There were no signs of trauma on her body, the police said. She was fully clothed.

A law enforcement official said investigators had found no signs of criminality. Her husband identified her body.

Since 2013, Judge Abdus-Salaam had been one of seven judges on the State Court of Appeals. Before that, she served for about four years as an associate justice on 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 city’s Law Department.

Zakiyyah Muhammad, the founding director of the Institute of Muslim American Studies, said Judge Abdus-Salaam became the first female Muslim judge in the United States when she started serving on the State Supreme Court in 1994.

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Source: The New York Times