Ex-Professor Held in Death of Wife

SAN JOSE —  A retired Stanford professor has been arrested in the strangulation of his ailing wife, whose death he initially reported to police as a suicide.

Harry Banoff, 76, a retired ophthalmologist and associate professor at Stanford, was being held without bail Monday, pending arraignment and a bail hearing. He was arrested early Sunday.

Alice Banoff, 69, was strangled late Friday or early Saturday at a retirement community where she and her husband lived in separate apartments, police said.

A family friend, Dr. Isaac Abrams, described Banoff as “a prince of a human being,” and said Alice Banoff had been seriously ill for years with colon cancer and a disease that causes muscle degeneration.