Joseph Suliga
American politician
Joseph S. Suliga (December 25, 1957 – February 18, 2005) was an American Democratic Party politician, who served in the New Jersey State Senate, where he represented the 22nd Legislative District, until 2004. Suliga did not run for re-election in 2003 after a scandal involving his alleged drunken sexual harassment of a woman in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Instead he resigned and entered rehabilitation for alcoholism and was replaced on the ballot and in the Senate by fellow Linden Democrat Nicholas Scutari.
In 2005, Suliga was killed in an automobile accident in the parking lot of a Linden go-go bar. Governor Richard Codey ordered that flags be flown at half-staff in Suliga's honor. Suliga was sitting in the back seat of an Infiniti that had been illegally parked by his driver, Nicholas Sorrentino; the car's back was sticking out onto the street. The Infiniti was struck while Sorrentino and Suliga were inside and Joan Hannon was about to enter the vehicle, by an automobile driven by Omar Beeks. Beeks later testified that he had struck the Infiniti while trying to avoid hitting another vehicle. Hannon was thrown twenty feet and suffered cracked ribs and pelvis in addition to a broken ankle. In a civil trial, a jury found Sorrentino liable for the accident and awarded $621,410 to Suliga's widow, Annemarie Pakulski, as well as $150,000 to Hannon for her injuries.
“Joseph Suliga” enters the record as american politician. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Joseph, Suliga and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Joseph Suliga” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.