A high-ranking official with the San Francisco medical examiner’s office allegedly chucked a human skull needed to identify a corpse in the trash — and ousted the well-meaning employee who reported his gaffe.
David Serrano Sewell, the executive director of San Francisco’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, “inexplicably” trashed the vital evidence during a rushed clean-up ahead of an inspection, axed employee Sonia Kominek-Adachi alleged in a lawsuit filed on Feb. 2.
Kominek-Adachi caught Serrano Sewell’s alleged mistake when she was doing an inventory of body parts stored in the office in January 2023 and realized an unidentified corpse, labeled “Doe #82,” was missing its head.
The office was legally required to keep the skull until they identified the Doe.
Serrano Sewell was promoted to the office’s executive director just one month earlier, according to his LinkedIn.
Records obtained byThe San Francisco Standardshowed that the skull belonged to a man found dead in an embankment beside a homeless encampment near Lake Merced in October 2014.
When the skull was discarded, it was encased in a clay cast as the staff attempted to reconstruct the appearance of the man’s face.
In the case that a body cannot be identified, or there are no next of kin left to claim it, the remains are cremated and scattered at the Golden Gate Bridge.
“The skull was a critical element in the [office’s] ability to identify [the remains]. Without the skull, further identification procedures could not be completed,” the lawsuit said.
After Kominek-Adachi flagged the disappearance, the head honcho allegedly “made no effort to initiate an investigation into the whereabouts of the skull and gave her the cold shoulder when she pressed further.
Source: California Post – Breaking California News, Photos & Videos
