On Monday, Samuel Saunders, 61, was found guilty of murdering Leandro Lozada, a popular Dominican-born pediatrician who founded and ran Hispanic Pediatrics on Kingsbridge Road near the Grand Concourse.
In addition to murder, Saunders was convicted of kidnapping, burglary, robbery and weapons charges.
Lozada, 46, was shot, execution style, in his Yonkers home in January 2007.
Saunders, a Bronx resident, used to own the Yonkers home that Lozada had purchased in 2006.
Prosecutors said Saunders and an accomplice, Juan Bernardez, 30, (whose trial starts Feb. 7) broke into Lozada’s house, tied him to a chair, forced him to sign a $57,000 check and then shot him in the head.
Saunders tried to deposit the check the day after the murder, but Lozada’s bank account had already been frozen. He told police that the check was for a real estate deal he and Lozada were working on. But police found blood on sneakers and a towel in a garbage bin at Saunders’ East Bronx apartment complex.
Sentencing is scheduled for March 26.
In our previous issue, the Norwood News ran a long piece about Lozada’s clinic, which is slowly rebounding from the trauma and still serving North Fordham’s low-income families. Read about it on our Web site, norwoodnews.org.
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Welcome to the Norwood News, a bi-weekly community newspaper that primarily serves the northwest Bronx communities of Norwood, Bedford Park, Fordham and University Heights. Through our Breaking Bronx blog, we focus on news and information for those neighborhoods, but aim to cover as much Bronx-related news as possible. Founded in 1988 by Mosholu Preservation Corporation, a not-for-profit affiliate of Montefiore Medical Center, the Norwood News began as a monthly and grew to a bi-weekly in 1994. In September 2003 the paper expanded to cover University Heights and now covers all the neighborhoods of Community District 7. The Norwood News exists to foster communication among citizens and organizations and to be a tool for neighborhood development efforts. The Norwood News runs the Bronx Youth Journalism Heard, a journalism training program for Bronx high school students. As you navigate this website, please let us know if you discover any glitches or if you have any suggestions. We’d love to hear from you. You can send e-mails to norwoodnews@norwoodnews.org or call us anytime (718) 324-4998.