Vid clues in death of judge
A pioneering judge was captured on surveillance video wandering around Harlem for hours before she was found floating in the Hudson River, police sources said on Wednesday — as her grieving husband insisted she didn’t commit suicide.
One video shows Court of Appeals Judge Sheila AbdusSalaam several hundred feet from the river, and the final clip — recorded at 12:30 a.m. April 12 — meshes with the estimated 12 hours her body spent in the water, sources said. She was found at 1:45 p.m.
At least six surveillance cameras captured Abdus-Salaam, the first African-American woman to serve on the state’s highest court, walking alone with no one following her, sources said.
Cops found the surveillance videos late Tuesday after the NYPD ramped up the probe into her death, as The Post exclusively reported.
Meanwhile, in a statement posted online, Abdus-Salaam’s husband, the Rev. Gregory Jacobs, blasted unspecified “media outlets and others” that “have conjectured that Sheila was the victim of a ‘probable suicide.’ ”
“These reports have frequently included unsubstantiated comments concerning my wife’s possible mental and emotional state of mind at the time of her death,” Jacobs said.
“Those of us who loved Sheila and knew her well do not believe that these unfounded conclusions have any basis in reality. And in the absence of any conclusive evidence, we believe such speculations to be unwarranted and irresponsible,” he added.
Jacobs — who neighbors said lives in Newark, NJ, and was visited there by AbdusSalaam on weekends — didn’t return messages.