Officer dies in apparent suicide

A police officer living in Van Cortlandt Village was found dead in his apartment last week as a result of an apparent suicide, police said.

The officer was a seven-year veteran of the NYPD, who served as a sergeant in Police Service Area 7 in Melrose. Police did not release his name. 

According to police, the officer’s girlfriend last saw him at 11 a.m. on Feb. 23. She returned later to see that he had apparently shot himself. 

“We don’t know what the other circumstances were, he was alone. It certainly wasn’t suspicious, it was just an unfortunate incident,” Deputy Inspector Terence O’Toole, the commanding officer of the 50^th precinct said. “I didn’t know him at all, we have a lot of police officers residing here in the precinct and he just took his own life for whatever reason.”

This was the third case of an NYPD officer committing suicide in 2017, according to police data. The first two occurred on Staten Island. 

“They come in spurts in the police department. This is the third one this year, in all of last year we only had four suicides,” O’Toole said. “In a 55,000 person organization that’s not too bad.”