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 Photo: Lori Van Buren Image 1 of / 3 Caption Close Image 1 of 3 Assemblyman Bill Nojay speaks during an Anti-SAFE Act rally at the West Capitol Park on Tuesday, June 11, 2013, in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union archive) Assemblyman Bill Nojay speaks during an Anti-SAFE Act rally at the West Capitol Park on Tuesday, June 11, 2013, in Albany, N.Y. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union archive) Photo: Lori Van Buren Image 2 of 3 Assemblyman Bill Nojay addresses a press conference at the Legislative Office Building on Wednesday, July 10, 2013 in Albany, NY. (Paul Buckowski / Times Union archive) Assemblyman Bill Nojay addresses a press conference at the Legislative Office Building on Wednesday, July 10, 2013 in Albany, NY. (Paul Buckowski / Times Union archive) Photo: Paul Buckowski Image 3 of 3 Bill Nojay, conservative assemblyman, 59 1 / 3 Back to Gallery 
 
 Albany 
 
 State lawmakers reacted with shock to the news of the apparent suicide of Rochester-area Assemblyman Bill Nojay, who according to local law enforcement shot himself Friday morning at the city's Riverside Cemetery. 
 
 An officer responding to a 9:22 a.m. call to check the welfare of a man spotted in the cemetery saw Nojay shoot himself, Rochester Police investigator Frank Camp said in a news conference. 
 
 Multiple reports said the 59-year-old Republican lawmaker killed himself at the family cemetery plot. 
 
 The news was followed by reports that Nojay's death might have been connected to a far more common phenomenon at the Capitol: an criminal investigation. 
 
 The Daily News reported that his suicide came as Nojay failed to show up in court to turn himself in for fraud charges. The Rochester Democrat & Chronicle reported those charges were related to a trust fund he handled as an attorney. 
 
 The newspaper reported earlier in the day that the FBI also had been probing a business deal related to the city's $1.3 billion school modernization program, which Nojay played a central role in. The newspaper had reported earlier this year that Nojay was involved behind the scenes in forming a company that sought a major contract part of the modernization program. 
 
 In a bizarre twist, the lawmaker also was involved in unrelated business dealings that had fallen under legal scrutiny in Southeast Asia. Cambodian prosecutors sought to question him as part of a fraud investigation in 2014 after a dentist in that nation had accused him of defrauding her of $1 million, according to reports. The trial in that case was delayed earlier this year, according to reports. 
 
 Nojay was a member of Akra Group, a company promoting agriculture products in Southeast Asia, according to his 2015 financial disclosure form on file with the state Joint Commission on Public Ethics. 
 
 Nojay was recalled by his colleagues as a staunch and outspoken conservative who was unafraid of attacking opponents regardless of party affiliation. 
 
 He worked as one of two election attorneys for Assembly GOP Leader Brian Kolb in a hotly contested February 2000 special election that first sent Kolb to Albany. 
 
 "Quite frankly, I don't think I would have gotten in the Assembly without his assistance," Kolb said in an interview. " ... He's always been a friend, he's been loyal to me as leader of our conference." 
 
 First elected in 2012, Nojay represented the 133rd Assembly District, which includes Livingston County and parts of Monroe and Steuben counties. He faced a primary challenge on Tuesday from Rick Milne, mayor of Honeoye Falls. Milne and Democratic candidate Barbara Baer both suspended their campaigns Friday. 
 
 When it came to legislative business, Nojay often went against the grain He voted aye 59 percent of the time in 2016, one of the lowest percentages for any Assembly member, according to an analysis by New York StateWatch. He voted nay 32 percent of the time, the second highest percentage in the chamber. Nojay voted with a majority of his fellow Assembly Republicans 68 percent of the time, again one of the lowest percentages in the Assembly, even with Democrats factored in. 
 
 As further evidence of his outspoken nature, he also was a vocal critic of the election of Long Island Republican John Flanagan as Senate majority leader in 2015, so much so that earlier this year he said he was seeking GOPers to run against Sen. Michael Nozzolio, R-Seneca County, who backed Flanagan during the 2015 leadership battle. Nozzolio decided not to seek re-election. 
 
 Flanagan in a statement Friday called Nojay "an outspoken advocate for conservative values, for his district, and for Upstate New York." 
 
 An early supporter of Donald Trump's political ambitions, Nojay was among the Legislature's most relentless critics of the SAFE Act gun control law. As such, he was an organizer of the pro-Second Amendment concert called Freedompalooza, held in Altamont in August 2013. 
 
 A conservative talk radio host, Nojay also listed work as vice president and counsel for Commodity Resource Corp., a California commodity futures advisory and brokerage firm, and as director and president of the Empire Page, a news aggregation website. 
 
 mhamilton@timesunion.com • 518-454-5449 • @matt_hamilton10 ||||| Suicide is impossible to pin on any one factor, and there was no way to say on Friday what had driven Mr. Nojay, 59, to his. But a number of his business dealings outside the Assembly had drawn the attention of federal investigators, one involving possible fraud in an agricultural marketing business he had started in Cambodia. On Friday, according to The Democrat & Chronicle of Rochester, he was to appear in court to face charges that he had embezzled $1.8 million from a legal client. 
 
 By the usual laws of Albany, Mr. Nojay, a junior upstate Republican in a legislative chamber dominated by New York City Democrats, should never have come within sniffing distance of prominence. 
 
 But then, he never limited himself to the backbenches. Not in the Capitol. Not in the headlines. Not in his goals. 
 
 Even his political-awakening story stood out: He said the moment came when he was 17, during a trip to the first Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, where he listened starry-eyed to President Ronald Reagan’s “city upon a hill” speech and shook Mr. Reagan’s hand. As a teenager, another push into local politics came from his family’s experiences caring for his severely disabled older brother. He got his law degree from Columbia Law School and practiced law in his native Rochester before winning his Assembly seat in 2012. 
 
 There was his audacious pitch, as a freshman lawmaker, to Mr. Trump: Run for governor of New York, he told Mr. Trump in 2013, and the path to the White House would be clear. (“Springboards to the Presidency,” Mr. Nojay’s four-page memo was called.) 
 
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 Three years later, he was a co-chairman of Mr. Trump’s New York campaign committee. 
 
 There was his penchant for speaking up for upstate concerns, using his radio show to denounce state leaders in Albany — Democrats and establishment Republicans — for what he called their indifference. Among his signature issues: railing against the SAFE Act, the New York gun-control legislation passed in 2013. 
 
 “I’m not on the governor’s Christmas card list, and you know something? That’s something I wear as a badge of honor,” he said on Thursday, in one of his final radio interviews. “Because I think that when you forcefully and strongly advocate for your district and you make that mark, even people that disagree with you respect your views.” 
 
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 The force of Mr. Nojay’s advocacy was not lost on anyone in the Legislature: “You knew exactly where he stood,” said Brian Kolb, the Assembly minority leader. “He ruffled feathers because he spoke it as he saw it.” 
 
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 And there were his far-flung business and nation-building ventures. In Afghanistan, he was an election monitor with the International Republican Institute. In Odessa, Ukraine, he consulted on an election between pro-Western and pro-Russian candidates. In Iran, he held the title “director and secretary/treasurer of the Foundation for Democracy,” according to his Assembly biography. 
 
 In Cambodia, which he said he had visited for various reasons since the 1980s, he started an agricultural marketing business with three partners, including Sichan Siv, the Cambodian-American former United States ambassador to the United Nations. The Akra Group, as it was called, solicited a $1 million investment from a wealthy Phnom Penh dentist around the end of 2012, said her American lawyer, Robert A. Simon. By 2014, Mr. Simon said, Akra showed no signs of marketing rice or of returning the $1 million, and his client, Dr. Lykuong Eng, filed a fraud complaint in Cambodia. 
 
 Despite being tried in absentia on and off since 2014, Mr. Nojay had brushed off the Cambodian investigation. “He said there’s nothing to it, just a feud among partners — one of them was disgruntled,” said Bill Reilich, the Monroe County Republican chairman, who knew Mr. Nojay for 20 years. Mr. Nojay was, he added, “kind of nonchalant” about the matter. 
 
 By this spring, federal agents in Rochester had subpoenaed documents related to the Cambodian investment from Mr. Simon, he said on Friday. 
 
 “It’s a shock,” said David DiPietro, a Republican assemblyman from the Buffalo area who was close to Mr. Nojay. “All of a sudden, hearing all these rumors, it’s amazing what you don’t know about somebody.” 
 
 Mr. Nojay faced a primary challenge on Tuesday. He lived in Pittsford, near Rochester, with his wife, Debra, with whom he had three children. 
 
 At 9:20 a.m. on Friday, a 911 call came in to the Rochester police, asking that they check on someone on at the Riverside Cemetery, a police spokesman said. 
 
 An officer arrived at the cemetery six minutes later, just as Mr. Nojay’s gun went off.
– A New York state lawmaker running for re-election killed himself Friday, four days before the state's Republican primary, the Democrat and Chronicle reports. Police were called about a distraught man at an area cemetery and arrived to see Bill Nojay shoot and kill himself. He died next to his brother's grave in his family's burial plot. It's unclear what led Nojay to kill himself, but the lawmaker had recently become embroiled in a number of controversies. According to the New York Times, he was accused of embezzling $1.8 million from a legal client and was supposed to be in court on those charges Friday. And federal investigators are looking into an agricultural business Nojay started in Cambodia after he allegedly took a $1 million donation from a Cambodian dentist and had nothing to show for it. He was also being investigated for his role in a $1.3 billion deal to modernize schools, the Albany Times Union reports. The 59-year-old father of three was first elected to the state assembly in 2012. Nojay was known for going against Democrats and Republicans alike and for his anti-gun control work. He hosted a local radio show and had been championing Donald Trump for president since 2013. He also worked on elections in Afghanistan and Ukraine. Nojay will remain on the primary ballot. If he ends up winning Tuesday, party leaders will have to nominate a replacement for the general election. Nojay's Republican challenger, Richard Milne, says he's "devastated" by the news and is "suspending all political activity until further notice."