The death of Judge Sheila Abdus-Salaam is desperately sad news.

She called her chambers on Tuesday to say she wasn’t coming in. The next day she was found in the Hudson, with no signs of trauma.

The unexpected death was shocking and saddening and even set off some suspicions among Judge Abdus-Salaam’s friends and colleagues, many of whom said she had given no indication that anyone — including herself — would want to do her harm.

In the hours after her body was found, the police said they were treating her death as a suicide. The judge, 65, had recently told friends and a doctor that she was suffering from stress. And tragedy had followed her closely: On Easter in 2012, her mother committed suicide at age 92, according to two law enforcement officials. Two years later, around the same holiday, her brother shot himself to death, the officials said.

She s0unds like someone we can’t afford to lose.

Since 2013, Judge Abdus-Salaam had been one of seven judges on the high court. Before that, she served for about four years with the First Appellate Division of the State Supreme Court, and for 15 years as a State Supreme Court justice in Manhattan. She was previously a lawyer in the state attorney general’s office.

Judge Abdus-Salaam was known for her steadfast liberal voice, regularly siding with immigrants, the poor, and people with mental illnesses against established interests. She also leaned toward injured parties who brought claims of fraud or misconduct against wealthy corporations.

She was admired by her colleagues for her thoughtfulness, candor and finely crafted writing style. And she was not one to use her decisions as a soapbox even when they set precedents.

…

After law school, Judge Abdus-Salaam became a public defender in Brooklyn and then served as an assistant attorney general in the Civil Rights Bureau of the state attorney general’s office. In one of her first cases, she won an anti-discrimination suit for more than 30 female New York City bus drivers who had been denied promotions.

Last summer, Judge Abdus-Salaam wrote an important decision, in the Matter of Brooke S.B. v. Elizabeth A.C.C., that expanded the definition of what it means to be a parent. For 25 years, the court had held that the nonbiological parent in a same-sex couple had no standing to seek custody or visitation rights after a breakup.

But that, Judge Abdus-Salaam wrote, had become “unworkable when applied to increasingly varied familial relationships.” In a tightly reasoned decision, she wrote that nonbiological parents did have standing to seek custody if they showed “by clear and convincing evidence that all parties agreed to conceive a child and to raise the child together.”

In an interview in 2014 about black history, Judge Abdus-Salaam said that she had become interested in her family’s history as a young girl in public school and that her research had led her to discover that her great-grandfather was a slave in Virginia.

“All the way from Arrington, Va., where my family was the property of someone else, to my sitting on the highest court of the State of New York is amazing and huge,” she said. “It tells you and me what it is to know who we are and what we can do.”

So, damn.