Manhunt for NY trauma surgeon goes nationwide

Associated Press

BUFFALO, N.Y.

Surgeon Timothy Jorden saved the lives of patients with gunshot wounds, lived in a big home by Lake Erie and owned four vehicles. He was a product of a working-class neighborhood who became an Army officer before coming home to earn his medical degree.

Now the healer is linked to a killing.

Police across the country were on the lookout Thursday for the 49-year-old trauma surgeon in connection with the shooting death of his ex-girlfriend in a building at the Buffalo hospital complex where they both worked. Police say the former Army weapons expert may be armed and should be considered dangerous.

“He was an excellent surgeon. He saved so many lives. For him to take one is unreal,” said a stunned June DuPree, a neighbor of Jorden’s in an exclusive cluster of homes on a lakefront bluff.

But she and others also said the affable and accomplished doctor seemed different lately — thinner, not quite as friendly and less meticulous about appearances. Friends of the victim, meanwhile, offered glimpses of a much darker side.

“I saw him at the beginning of the season and noticed how much weight he had lost,” DuPree said. “He said, ‘Yeah, I lost a little bit.’ But it was more than a little bit. It was a lot. He wasn’t too friendly that time I saw him. He just didn’t want to talk.”

The search for Jorden began Wednesday morning when 33-year-old Jacqueline Wisniewski was found shot to death in a stairwell on the campus of the Erie County Medical Center.

Police say she was shot four times.

Heather Shipley, a friend of Wisniewski’s, told WIVB-TV that Wisniewski feared Jorden and that he wouldn’t let go after she left him because she believed he was having affairs with other women.

She said Wisniewski told her the doctor had put a GPS tracking device in her car and once held her captive in her home for a day-and-a- half, wielding a knife.

“She told me if anything happened to her, that it was him,” Shipley told the station.