Pair Charged in Death of N.Y. Prosecutor

Two people were charged Friday with shooting to death an assistant prosecutor who happened into the line of fire in a drug turf battle one block from the courthouse where he worked, police said.

Jose Diaz, 21, and Ernesto Garcia, 16, were each charged with second-degree murder, second-degree attempted murder and criminal possession of a weapon.

Police said Sean Healy, 30, an assistant district attorney in the Bronx, was buying doughnuts at a grocery store Thursday when three men in a car pulled up and fired seven or eight shots. Healy was struck once in the back.

At a news conference Friday, Police Commissioner Lee Brown said the shooting of Healy was the result of a fight over drug turf.

The commissioner said Diaz fired the shots from a 9-millimeter automatic. Garcia’s role was not known.

The shooting took place just blocks from Yankee Stadium in a drug-plagued neighborhood of the Bronx where robberies and thefts are common. In his novel “The Bonfire of the Vanities,” author Tom Wolfe paints the area as so dangerous that even prosecutors fear for their own safety.

Healy was appointed to the district attorney’s office on Jan. 16, and was assigned to Bronx Criminal Court, where prosecutions usually involve minor charges that result in jail terms of a year or less, said Steven Reed, a spokesman for District Attorney Robert Johnson.

On Thursday, a former state senator, 49-year-old Vander Beatty, was fatally shot in his office in the Brooklyn borough.

Beatty, a Democrat who left the state Senate after being convicted of forgery and racketeering in 1984 and served 19 months in prison, was shot once in the head at his office. Police said he was killed by an unidentified man who drove away.

The car the gunman used was found parked a few blocks away from Beatty’s reelection headquarters. Detectives were trying to find the car’s owner, Arthur E. Flourney, 51, a retired Corrections Department captain, said police Officer Ralph St. Just.