David Joffe wrote his suicide note in longhand on a sheet of yellow paper: “I have killed Max for telling a lie that cost my job. My job was my life and I have no reason to live.”

The note was dated Feb. 20.

On March 13, Joffe did what he had been thinking about for three weeks.

At 8:30 a.m. that Friday, Joffe walked into Uncle Al’s Cafe in Sunrise, where he had been a chef, and shot co-worker Maxie DaCosta Jr. to death. He then killed himself.

Police, called by a woman who hid inside the restaurant while the two men argued, found Joffe and DaCosta on the kitchen floor a few feet apart. DaCosta, 32, had been shot five times with a .38-caliber revolver. Joffe shot himself in the head with the sixth bullet.

The suicide note, part of it notarized, was released by the Broward Medical Examiner’s Office on Tuesday. It indicated Joffe, 48, killed himself because of DaCosta’s “lie” and because Joffe “made a mess of (Uncle Al’s) business.” The note does not say what the lie or the mess were.

“I could not let what Max did to my life go unpunished,” Joffe wrote in the three-page note. “I have killed myself not wanting to go to jail and feel I am to old to start over again.”

Sunrise detectives said Joffe was upset because he had been transferred from Uncle Al’s in Sunrise to Uncle Al’s in Davie.

Joffe’s sister, Lenore Jansen, said Joffe had humanely destroyed his 9-year- old Akita dog at about the time the suicide note was written.

Joffe, who lived in a trailer park in the 4700 block of Southwest 39th Avenue in Fort Lauderdale for several years, moved six weeks ago to Dania and paid $6,000 for another trailer, said Ed Jansen, his brother-in-law.

“Max helped him pack the truck,” Ed Jansen said. “He came all the way over here to help him move.”

Joffe apparently held no ill will toward Al Cikra, who owns the Uncle Al’s restaurants in Westgate Square at 15846 State Road 84 and in Davie.

“I owe Uncle Al $1,000. Please pay him from the sale of the stuff you sell,” Joffe wrote in his note. “Uncle Al is a good man and I don’t want him to think everything he does to help people is in vain. Al was very good to me and I’m sorry I made a mess of his business.”

Ed Jansen said Joffe bought the pistol he used after he was robbed and beaten last year. “He didn’t know a thing about guns. I made him go back to the store and learn something about the gun,” Jansen said.

In his note, Joffe left his other pets to June Connelly and George Strauch, neighbors who had befriended him.

His note said, “they helped me and loved me. It is my wish that June and George receive my home, which is paid for, and all that I own. They have paid me for it, $5.00 cash.”

Connelly refused to discuss the house but said the murder-suicide was totally out of character for Joffe, “probably one of my best friends.”

Connelly said she saw Joffe several days before the murder-suicide. “He told me someone at work lied about him and it would probably cost his job, but he wouldn’t get specific,” she said.

“Let me tell you that the man I knew was one of the gentlest people alive … He was not a lunatic. He was a nice guy, an average guy,” Connelly said. “I had no idea he was going to kill himself.”

Ed Jansen said the murder-suicide and Joffe’s bequest were both irrational acts: “He did something totally out of character. He just snapped.”

—- Staff Writer Ray Lynch contributed to this report.