Governor Cuomo and other officials around New York are expressing shock and sorrow after a justice of the state’s highest court was found dead in the Hudson River on Wednesday.
Police are investigating how Justice Sheila Abdus-Salaam came to be in the water. A preliminary report says the NYPD found no signs of criminality or of trauma. Her body was spotted floating off 132nd Street in Upper Manhattan, not far from where she lived. Paramedics pronounced her dead shortly after police recovered the body.
Justice Abdus-Salam was the first African-American woman to sit on the Court of Appeals when she was appointed four years ago. Although often called the first Muslim judge elected in the US, that’s not accurate. Her first husband was Muslim, but she never converted according to a Court of Appeals spokesman.