On December 7, 2021, the son of retired First Grade Det. Joseph Ferraro was found dead in his home in Tennessee. Thirty-four-year-old Dr. Joseph Ferraro was a trauma surgeon who moved south to work in a hospital and was dedicated to helping to save lives. With almost no investigation, the local Murfreesboro, Tennessee Medical Examiner and local police immediately ruled the death a suicide, although the Ferraro family has no reason to believe son Joseph would ever have done such a thing. On the contrary, he had a girlfriend present at the time of death and a gun in his home. There had been previous incidents in New York where the girlfriend threatened to kill herself and had to be removed by responding police from Dr. Ferraro’s apartment on at least one occasion for a domestic violence incident.
The Ferraro family has a long history of public service. Detective Joseph Ferraro was appointed to the NYPD in 1981, and retired from Detective Borough Brooklyn as a First Grader in 2009. His own father retired as a Detective in 1982 after 26 years with the NYPD. Both Det. Joe Ferraro and his son worked at Staten Island University Hospital for a long time and always took special care of our MOS brothers and sisters and their families. Dr. Ferraro spent five years of surgical residency at SIUH, and a two-year fellowship in trauma surgery at Robert Wood Johnson. In 1979, before Det. Ferraro joined the force, Joe became a nurse, and worked as a nurse in the ER all through his policing career. After retirement from the Police Department, he continued nursing and became a Nurse Practitioner. He is currently working at Staten Island University Hospital.
Joe and the rest of the Ferraro family are determined to get a proper investigation of their son’s death in a state that has a history of skirting its responsibility to do thorough investigations. Tennessee has a history of suicide rulings that were found to be inaccurate. In 2017, the State had to begin enacting a series of laws to grant families an appeal process to allow them to seek justice for their loved ones. The Ferraro family is fighting the suicide determination, but the process is very expensive. They have started a “Go Fund Me” page to raise funds to overturn the suicide determination and seek justice for Dr. Joseph Ferraro.
Click on the link below to read more about Dr. Joseph Ferraro’s death. Anything you can contribute will be greatly appreciated.
https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-the-ferraros-in-getting-justiceforjoe
