DOCTOR ODs
A TOP MANHATTAN doctor was found dead in his Park Ave. apartment from a suspected overdose of heroin, police sources said Wednesday.
Ravindra Rajmane, 51, was discovered lifeless in the bedroom of his ritzy apartment near E. 27th St. shortly before 9:30 a.m. Tuesday after he failed to show up for work.
Cops found several glassine envelopes with heroin residue near his body. The envelopes were stamped with the brand name “Knock Out King,” police sources said.
NYPD Chief of Detectives Robert Boyce made a public plea Wednesday for information about the potentially deadly batch of heroin.
“Glassine envelopes with the stamp Knock Out King were discovered at the scene,” Boyce tweeted.
He asked anyone with information about the stamp to call the CrimeStoppers line at (800) 577-TIPS.
Rajmane, the chief of pulmonology at NYU Langone Hospital Brooklyn, hadn’t shown up to work since Friday, leading a worried co-worker to visit his apartment Tuesday, police said.
“Someone came in and said that they were checking up on (Rajmane),” said a doorman at Rajmane’s building, who decline to give his name. “So I had someone go up and knock on the door.”
A building maintenance worker opened the apartment and Rajmane’s colleague found the doctor on his bed. He had been dead for at least two days, a police source said.
Moments later, the doorman saw the co-worker running downstairs crying.
“She was upset,” the doorman said. “(Rajmane) was a nice guy. Nobody expects that to happen.”
The doctor’s sudden death comes as the city grapples with an unprecedented opioid epidemic. More than 1,300 people died of drug overdoses in the five boroughs last year.
The city medical examiner’s office is slated to perform an autopsy on Rajmane to determine his exact cause of death.
An NYU Langone spokeswoman declined to comment.
A graduate of the University of Chicago and Jefferson Medical College, Rajmane joined NYU Langone in 2015.
“The concept of helping everyone is what inspired me to practice medicine,” the doctor said in a press release announcing his hiring. “No matter your ethnicity, political views, or religion, if you’re sick in the hospital you will be cared for.”