Photos: Finz & Finz\YouTube
On a warm Saturday afternoon in late June 2010, three 911 callers reported that a man lay unresponsive on the sidewalk in front of a warehouse in College Point, Queens. There was no mention of a pedometer or anyone seeing the man collapse. “Bleeding!” stated one caller’s companion. At 8:13 that evening, Sun-Ming “Sunny” Sheu, a Taiwanese immigrant in his early 50s, died at a Flushing hospital.
Three days before his death, Sheu had gone to the Office of Court Administration (OCA) to follow-up on an ethics complaint he had filed in late 2009 against Queens Supreme Court Judge Joseph Golia.
Since 2001, the judge (above) had been handling a foreclosure case that took away Sheu’s home in Flushing. Sheu maintained that he had been the victim of mortgage fraud. In 2009, Sheu informed the FBI that he viewed Judge Golia as complicit with the plaintiff against him, a title company named Old Republic.
Sheu, a technology consultant, meanwhile discovered that the judge had not disclosed extensive real-estate holdings on his ethics reports, as legally required.
In April 2010, an OCA official informed Sheu that Golia had amended his filing in response to Sheu’s complaint. He then recorded a chilling video (later posted on YouTube), stating he was doing so for his own “safety and protection.” “If anything wrong” happens to him, he warned, “it would come from Judge Golia.”
