Triangle of death
3 jail guards tangle, 1 is gunned down in Queens
A LOVE triangle involving three city correction officers ended Friday with one of them dead on a Queens street corner.
Jeffrey Ragland was fatally shot by a younger rival after he allegedly slugged the woman both men had coveted, police said.
Following the bloodshed in Queens Village, Oniel Linton, 36, and his girlfriend, Salees Sales, 33, were being questioned by detectives. No charges had been filed as of Friday night.
Linton claimed he fired his gun because he thought Ragland was reaching for a piece to draw on him, sources said.
It remained unclear whether Ragland, a 50-year-old who had recently retired from the Department of Correction, was armed.
Linton and Sales became correction officers on the same day in 2004, sources said.
The deadly confrontation with Ragland happened shortly after Linton and Sales left Linton’s home at 4:30 a.m. and headed to work in separate cars, sources said.
Ragland was waiting for Sales when she got to her car at the corner of 227th St. and 108th Ave. and angry words quickly turned to violence, sources said.
Linton told police he was driving by when he saw Ragland hit Sales and that he quickly pulled over. He said he ran over and knocked Ragland to the ground before drawing his gun.
“I heard two shots like, ‘ Pop! Pop!’” said Lauristine Finch, 72, who lives on 108th Ave. “They couldn’t have been more than 10 seconds apart.”
“I knew it wasn’t a firecracker,” Finch added. “It was too loud and too strong for it to be a firecracker. A few minutes later, I heard the police cars.”
Ragland was rushed to Long Island Jewish Hospital, where he died.
“He was an amazing, helping guy,” said a former colleague of Ragland’s at the Correction Department, who asked not to be identified. “A gentle giant.”
Ragland’s relatives gathered at his home in the Jamaica section but were still too stunned to speak.
“Not at all,” a relative said later when a reporter knocked on the dead man’s door and asked if the family wanted to speak about him.