By Corey Kilgannon, New York Times
A police officer who rose over a 19-year-career to the rank of deputy inspector, but then recently came under departmental investigation, arrived at work in Queens yesterday morning and fatally shot himself in the head, the authorities said.
The officer, Deputy Inspector Richard Capolongo, 42, arrived a half-hour early for his 7 a.m. shift at the 107th Precinct station in Fresh Meadows. He exchanged pleasantries with some other officers and walked into the locker room, where he took out his service gun and shot himself in the head, according to the police and police union officials.
Inspector Capolongo left no suicide note, and officials said they did not know why he killed himself. It was not known whether Inspector Capolongo had been undergoing counseling for any personal or job-related problems.
He was a high-ranking official in the Manhattan North narcotics squad, but was transferred several months ago to Queens South patrol headquarters, while the department’s Internal Affairs Bureau investigated whether he repeatedly left his police job early to moonlight at a second job, providing security at a Staten Island strip mall.
Inspector Capolongo, who lived on Staten Island, left behind a wife and an 11 year-old son.
“I’m just at a loss to explain what happened,” said Philip Karasyk, a lawyer for Inspector Capolongo in the departmental investigation. He said he last spoke with Inspector Capolongo about two weeks ago.
“It didn’t appear that there was a very strong case or a very big case of large abuse, because he remained on full duty,” Mr. Karasyk said. “He was concerned about the investigation, of course. I was positive about the outcome. I didn’t see it as career-ending or anything like that.”
Mr. Capolongo’s death is the fourth suicide this year by a member of the city’s Police Department, the police said. Since 1984, the average number of police suicides a year has been six; in 1994, a record 12 members of the department killed themselves. But over the last 10 years, the average number of police suicides a year dropped to five, the police said.
The department expanded its counseling services, offered seminars and created a film on suicide narrated by the actor Dennis Franz, who portrays a detective on the television show “N.Y.P.D. Blue.”
Asked about the suicide at a news conference yesterday, Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly, said: “Our hearts and prayers go out to his family. The investigation was still open, but it was administrative in nature.”
Although police suicides tend to make headlines, New York City officers are actually less likely to commit suicide than the average New Yorker, according to a study about police suicides published in 2002 in The American Journal of Psychiatry.
“Rates are not higher than the general population, but they tend to be public events and get more media attention,” said Peter M. Marzuk, an associate professor of psychiatry at Weill Medical College of Cornell University, who helped write the study, which reported that personal problems are just as much to blame as job-related problems in leading to officers’ suicides, and that 94 percent of police officers use their guns to commit suicide.
The investigation into Inspector Capolongo’s activities was reported by The New York Post in October. An article reported that Internal Affairs investigators had found that Inspector Capolongo was using a department-issued E-ZPass tag to travel to the second job, and that toll records proved he was away from his job during working hours. The article contained a photograph of him and the headline, “Top Drug Cop Cut Work for 2nd Job.”
Outside the 107th Precinct station house yesterday, none of a dozen officers approached would say anything about Inspector Capolongo.
A woman who answered the phone at his home on Staten Island yesterday afternoon said, “He was a very good man,” and then passed the phone to a man who said that his first name was Vincent and that he was the inspector’s uncle. He said Inspector Capolongo “was a very good person and good father” who worked hard to support his wife and son.
John F. Driscoll, president of the Captains Endowment Association, which works with the department’s roughly 135 deputy inspectors, said that Inspector Capolongo was promoted to deputy inspector in September 2002. “There were no indications from anybody that knew or spoke to him that he would harm himself,” Mr. Driscoll said.