For those who knew, loved and worked with the late Dr. Leandro Lozada, the pain from his abrupt and senseless death is still fresh, like a scab that has yet to harden.

Just over a year ago, Lozada, the pediatrician who founded and ran Hispanic Pediatrics, a children’s health clinic across the street from Poe Cottage in a rough section of North Fordham, was brutally murdered in his Westchester County home.

The murder set off a brief period of chaos, but the clinic, its employees and family members have slowly plodded down the road to recovery, keeping his life and legacy in mind.

“We try to do things how he would have wanted them done,” says Johanny Escano, the clinic’s referral coordinator. “He always put his patients first. He didn’t mind if they couldn’t pay or they didn’t have insurance. He treated everyone.”

‘Planting a Seed’

Born and educated in the Dominican Republic, Lozada moved to New York City with his young family in the 1990s to become a pediatrician. In 1998, he opened up Hispanic Pediatrics in a small apartment on the corner of Kingsbridge Road and the Grand Concourse. Though he could have opened it anywhere, he chose that particular area because it was a low-income Hispanic community that needed his services.

When his practice had outgrown the cramped Concourse space in 2003, he moved the clinic two blocks to its current location across from Poe Cottage. Through word of mouth, Lozada’s patient list grew to the point where he was seeing 80 to 90 kids a day. Escano says Hispanic Pediatrics has now treated nearly 10,000 different children, whether they had insurance or not.

Ruth Rivera took all four of her children, including one daughter with multiple handicaps, to Dr. Lozada when he first started out.

Rivera lives across the street from the doctor’s first Grand Concourse location and remembers seeing his light on late at night. He was seeing patients he couldn’t get to during the day. The doctor worked so hard, Rivera says she often worried about his well-being.  She would bring him oranges because she knew he wasn’t taking any breaks to eat.

“He was an excellent doctor, very passionate and caring,” she says in Spanish.

Rivera still brings her children to the clinic and the doctors are still good, she says, “but it’s not the same.” A picture of Lozada hangs near Rivera’s front door and she looks at it every day.

“I will always remember him for the rest of my life,” Rivera says. “He planted a seed and that plant will always grow and we will always water it.”  

Lozada wanted his office to be a professional environment and held himself and his dozen or so employees to high standards, Escano says. He was strict without being mean. During down time, Escano says Lozada would give his employees, many of them young ladies, personal advice and it always seemed to make sense.

Lozada’s niece, Emily Hernandez, credits her uncle with keeping her out of the war in Iraq. She had all but started Navy boot camp when Lozada told her she should put her honor roll smarts (she graduated from DeWitt Clinton High School in three years) to better use.

“He was very good at counseling and guidance,” says Hernandez, who is now office manager at Hispanic Pediatrics and also getting her business degree at Baruch College.

But his first priority was his patients. He knew all of them by name. Between examinations, he would wander into the lobby to see who was waiting. Often, he would see a child, recognize their need for urgent care and take them into a room for immediate examination. He would give his jacket to a shivering child in the waiting room.

Chaos and Disbelief

When the always punctual Lozada didn’t show up to work on a Wednesday morning last January, Escano and the rest of the staff knew something was wrong. They called his cell phone and paged him repeatedly. No response.

“Even if he was just going to be a little late, he would always call us to let us know his plans,” Escano says.

Finally, with the office packed with patients and parents, word came that Lozada had fainted and died. That can’t be true, everyone thought.

The rumor swirled around the office and into the waiting room. “It was chaos,” Escano says, recalling the scene like it was yesterday. “Everyone was screaming and crying, people calling on their cell phones. They [the parents] all know each other, so more people kept showing up, asking what happened?”  

Everyone was in disbelief. “Tell me it’s not true!” Patients called the office pleading.

Later that day, Hernandez received a call from Nivea Chuan, Lozada’s ex-wife and the mother of his two children: Joel, now 22, and Kathleen, 17.  

“Me lo mataran, Me lo mataran,” Hernandez says Chuan kept repeating. They killed a piece of me, she was saying.

It turned out they, whoever they were, had shot Lozada several times in the head at close range, execution style, while he was bound to a chair in his Scarsdale home.

During the investigation, all of Lozada’s bank accounts were frozen. Bills began piling up and the staff needed to be paid. Lozada had made up a will, but hadn’t signed it, leading to questions about his estate and who would run the clinic.

‘One Day at a Time’

Lozada’s family stepped up and delivered. Chuan freed up money from one of her investments and took care of the payroll until Lozada’s estate was handed over to his son. Joel, blessed with his father’s strength, told the clinic’s staff that Hispanic Pediatrics would stay open, as its founder intended. Another doctor at the clinic, Dr. Jose Bordas, whose contract was about to expire last February, stayed until May while Hernandez, the new office manager, searched for a Spanish-speaking replacement. (They ended up leasing Dr. Aleska Pelaez from Bronx-Lebanon Hospital as a stop-gap measure.)

“We just took it one day at a time,” Hernandez says, sitting in Lozada’s old office, where the walls are still adorned with his medical degrees and a big picture of Gandhi. “I still can’t believe he’s gone. It’s like, he could walk through that door right now and I wouldn’t be surprised.”

It will never be the same, but Hispanic Pediatrics is on solid footing and continues to serve the community’s children. Some patients have left, but some are trickling back.

Chuan is finishing her pediatric residency at Lincoln Hospital and has plans to come work at the clinic next year. They are planning to do major renovations and upgrade the clinic’s technology and equipment in the next couple of years, Hernandez says.

In early January, Lozada’s family and friends held a memorial for him at St. Philip Neri Church on the one-year anniversary of his death.

Luis Gonzalez, the Salvadoran doctor who the clinic hired in December, was in attendance. Hernandez says they hired the 30-year-old because he shares some of the same traits as Lozada. He even looks like him, people say. “Are you Dr. Lozada’s son?” parents ask.

People tell him how much they loved his predecessor and he knows he has a lot to live up to.

“I never thought I’d be able to replace him,” he says. “Right now, I’m just admiring him from afar.”