Disguised hitman kills son of Epstein judge at family home
Husband also injured as student is shot dead
A HITMAN disguised as a delivery driver killed the son of a federal judge and critically wounded her husband on the doorstep of their house.
The attack against the family of Esther Salas, 51, came four days after she was assigned to a case linked to paedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein.
The double shooting happened while the New Jersey district judge was in the basement of her home. Her son Daniel Anderl, 20, opened the door to a man dressed as a FedEx driver and was shot once in the chest with a semi-automatic weapon, officials said.
The judge’s husband, lawyer Mark Anderl, 63, was standing just behind him and was critically hurt after being shot several times.
The gunman then fled the house in North Brunswick, New Jersey, after the shooting on Sunday evening. But after an FBI manhunt was launched, police last night said a suspect had been found dead in his car from a selfinflicted gunshot wound.
According to US media, law enforcement sources said he is an attorney who appeared before Ms Salas in 2015. In the car found in the town of Liberty, outside New York, was a FedEx package addressed to the judge. Friends said that although Ms Salas has jailed several high-profile gang leaders and been threatened in the past, there had been no such intimidation this time. Last Thursday she was assigned a class-action lawsuit brought by investors against Deutsche Bank for failing to monitor high-risk customers such as Epstein.
This month, the bank was fined $152million for ‘compliance failures’ in its dealings with, among others, the multimillionaire who killed himself in prison last year. New York State regulators said the bank had processed hundreds of transactions for the former Wall Street trader, including payments to Russian models and ‘suspicious’ cash withdrawals which should have been flagged. Investors are now suing, accusing Deutsche Bank of ‘false and misleading statements’ before it agreed to pay the fine and so costing them money. The fatal victim of the shooting was a student at the Catholic University of America in Washington DC. He hoped to follow his parents into law and ‘had his whole future ahead’ of him, friends said.
His father was in a critical but stable condition after surgery. Francis Womack, mayor of North Brunswick, said: ‘As a judge, she [Ms Salas] had threats from time to time but everyone is saying that recently there had not been any. No words can express the sadness and loss we share as a community.’
New Jersey attorney general Gurbir Grewal said he was ‘shocked by this horrific and violent act’. Ms Salas, who is based in Newark, was nominated as a district court judge by president Barack Obama and confirmed in 2011, becoming the first Hispanic woman to serve on the federal bench in the state.
Her highest-profile case was in 2014 when Teresa and Joe Giudice, reality TV stars of The Real Housewives of New Jersey, were given jail terms for fraud. In 2017 Ms Salas barred prosecutors from seeking the death penalty for a gang boss charged with several murders because of his intellectual disability. She later jailed him for 45 years.
‘Threats from time to time’
‘Nominated by Barack Obama’