Joseph Rago: Cause Of Death Released For Wall Street Journal Writer Found Dead In NYC

EAST VILLAGE, NY — After nearly three months of investigation, the NYC Medical Examiner has announced a cause of death for Joseph Rago, the prodigious young Wall Street Journal editorial writer found dead in his East Village apartment on July 20. He was only 34.

"The cause of death is sarcoidosis involving lungs, heart, spleen, hilar and mediastinal lymph nodes," Julie Bolcer, director of communications for the Medical Examiner, said in an email Tuesday. "The manner of death is natural."

From the beginning, the NYPD didn't suspect foul play. Rago was found "with no obvious signs of trauma," the Journal reported at the time. (For more local news, sign up to receive Patch's newsletters and alerts for your NYC neighborhood.)

Sarcoidosis, which causes severe inflammation of the organs, is still relatively mysterious to doctors.

According to the Foundation for Sarcoidosis Research: "Despite the best efforts of researchers for more than a century working to better understand the complexities of this disease, sarcoidosis remains difficult to diagnose with limited therapies. Many patients suffer for years before arriving at the correct diagnosis or discovering the best treatment plan."

Here's how the disease manifests, according to the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute:

Normally, your immune system defends your body against foreign or harmful substances. For example, it sends special cells to protect organs that are in danger. These cells release chemicals that recruit other cells to isolate and destroy the harmful substance. Inflammation occurs during this process. Once the harmful substance is gone, the cells and the inflammation go away. In people who have sarcoidosis, the inflammation doesn't go away. Instead, some of the immune system cells cluster to form lumps called granulomas (gran-yu-LO-mas) in various organs in your body.

It's unclear if Rago, a native of Falmouth, Massachusetts, was aware he had sarcoidosis before he died.

NYPD officers said they found him lifeless on the night of July 20 inside his East Village apartment at 10 St. Mark’s Place, near Third Avenue, after Rago's colleagues at the Wall Street Journal asked police to check on him. They grew worried when he didn't come into work that morning, the Journal reported.

Rago's editor remembered him as a "a splendid journalist and beloved friend" in an obituary that ran the day after.

“I immediately hired him,” his editor remembered of the summer intern who showed up from Dartmouth College circa 2005. “He was just too good not to hire.”

By 2011, Rago had won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing. The judges praised him for his “well crafted, against-the-grain editorials challenging the health care reform advocated by President Obama."

But in more than a decade of political critique, despite his conservative leanings, Rago earned respect from policymakers on both sides of the aisle for highly discerning, deeply reported takes that spared no one. The 34-year-old published his final editorial — a blistering review of the U.S. Senate's botched attempts at health care reform under Trump, titled "The ObamaCare Republicans" — just two days before he died.

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