But why? Lorich was a successful orthopedic surgeon, married, father of three girls. His 11-year-old daughter found him face-up on the bathroom floor, but there was no suicide note.
Lorich was being sued by former Giants running back Michael Cox, 29, for alleged failure to properly treat one of his ankle bones damaged by a 2014 game injury.
The last time Lorich’s name had been in the media was in 2014 when he operated on Bono after the U2 lead singer’s biking accident.
Yet Lorich once entered not only the news, but the realm of international controversy as well. So much so, that his name appeared in one of the Hillary Clinton emails released by the State Department during her Secretary of State private email server scandal.
Lorich was part of a small medical team prompted by people close to Clinton to head to Haiti after the Caribbean nation suffered a devastating magnitude 7.0 earthquake on Tuesday, Jan. 12, 2010.
Helfet himself had connections to Hillary and Bill Clinton and their Clinton Foundation.
At the time, the foundation was active in Haiti. Bill Clinton was also the United Nations special envoy for the country.
He put together a team of surgeons, anesthesiologists, nurses, and technicians, 13 in total, to fly on the Synthes plane to Haiti and help however they could.
They set off on Friday and, after some delays, arrived in Port-au-Prince on Saturday, Jan. 16, 2010.
Lorich was shocked by what he saw on the ground. Not just the sheer destruction caused by the earthquake, but also the jarring lack of leadership, organization, and coordination.
The hospital they were directed to was in shambles. They found a different one, which at least had running water and electricity, but almost no medical supplies. They asked Synthes to send more supplies. The company did, but the truckload was hijacked on the way from the airport to the hospital.
Still, within 72 hours the team completed about 100 surgeries until they ran out of supplies and, escorted by some Jamaican soldiers, left the hospital and hailed a plane to Canada on the following Tuesday.
But that was only the beginning.
There Lorich expounded on his criticism of the situation in a country that, after decades of intense international involvement, had virtually no functioning government.
“That was the biggest problem we saw, though, was that there was nobody in charge. It was a sovereign country, and their government really never stepped up, at least in the period of time that we were there,” he said. “All the NGOs had been there for decades and provided fish, but they’d never taught the Haitians how to fish.”
Lorich repeatedly bringing up the total lack of leadership in the country was especially embarrassing to the Clintons, for whom Haiti had been a pet project of sorts.
It was Bill Clinton who used the threat of military intervention to install the Haitian socialist President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 1994, after he was ousted by his own military three years earlier.
The country had thousands of registered nonprofits, some backed by Democratic heavyweights like the Clintons and George Soros.
Bill Clinton recently hosted an investor conference in the country and Hillary Clinton sat at the State Department, where she had sway over international aid.
But it appears like Lorich’s team was sent in with bad information, no security, and little support.
Lorich hasn’t repeated his acute observations since 2010—at least there seems to be no online record of it. It is not clear whether his interest in Haiti continued.
