Coroners

The Orange County district attorney is set to announce Wednesday whether criminal charges will be filed against six Fullerton police officers involved in a violent confrontation that led to the death of a mentally ill homeless man. A coroner's report in the controversial death of Kelly Thomas, 37, was handed over late Tuesday to Dist. Atty. Tony Rackauckas, but the findings have not been made public. Witnesses have alleged that Thomas, a familiar figure in downtown Fullerton, was repeatedly shocked with a stun gun and beaten until he was unconscious by officers.

The San Mateo County coroner's office Tuesday released the names of five women killed on the San Mateo-Hayward Bridge when their limousine became engulfed in flames. They are: Neriza Fojas, 31, and Michelle Estrera, 35, of Fresno; Jennifer Balon, 39, of Dublin, Calif.; Anna Alcantara, 46, of San Lorenzo, Calif.; and Felomina Geronga, 43, of Alameda. Four others survived. Other than Geronga, the close-knit Filipina friends were all nurses who had met while working at Oakland's Fruitvale Healthcare Center, bonding like "sisters," one survivor told a local television station.

The deputy coroner who performed the autopsy on Hermosa Beach model Linda Sobek testified Wednesday that she could not have died from accidental asphyxiation in the manner claimed by her alleged killer, photographer Charles Rathbun. Instead, Dr. James Ribe stood by his earlier conclusion that the 27-year-old woman was sodomized and strangled.

The death earlier this year of Scott Sterling, 32-year-old son of Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling, was caused by a pulmonary embolism and "intravenous narcotic medication intake," the Los Angeles County coroner said Monday. The death was ruled accidental. Sterling was found dead in his apartment on Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu late on New Year's Day. Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department officials quickly determined that his death did not involve foul play but apparently stemmed from a drug overdose.

Ray Carrillo vowed to restore respect and harmony when he was elected two years ago to head what was widely considered a badly managed coroner's office. But midway through his four-year term, the Riverside County coroner presides over an office that some say suffers from mismanagement, poor working conditions, and badly trained investigators. There have been sensational cases and blunders, including the handling of Liberace's death and the mistaken cremation of a possible homicide victim.

The coroner Wednesday announced an investigation into the death of flamboyant attorney Melvin Belli after complaints from family members. Belli, 88, died Tuesday. He had been suffering from pancreatic cancer, a stroke and pneumonia, said his wife of 11 weeks, Nancy Ho Belli. But Belli's daughter-in-law Gretchen Belli, married to his son and former partner Caesar Belli, said Wednesday that the family did not accept that explanation.

Though the subject was death, reflexive laughter could be heard inside a Radisson Plaza Hotel Orange County Airport meeting room during a slide show of homicide victims presented Monday at a coroners convention here. "Looks like a shaving accident," a voice sang out when one grisly image of a dead woman appeared, a knife jutting from her throat.

With a frankness that is beguiling and a precision of manner that is reassuring, Los Angeles County Coroner Dr. Lakshmanan Sathyavagiswaran is making an impression as he leads jurors and spectators through the maze of forensic medical evidence in the O.J. Simpson trial. The 46-year-old chief medical examiner, born and trained in India, has spent six emotionally charged days on the witness stand in a trial that has captured the nation's attention.

Sometimes coroners have to be detectives. To figure out who died and why, they follow clues, check up on leads and examine circumstances and surroundings. But it gets difficult when their main "witness"--the body--is so decomposed that it can't tell the post-mortem story on which a coroner's investigator relies. That's when the Los Angeles County coroner's office calls in Lloyd Mahanay, a senior criminalist with the county coroner's office.

Keith Ray Zorn died alone, sprawled face down outside the mini-mall storage room where he had lived a hermit's life, a gray-bearded drifter felled by a fatal heart attack. The 60-year-old transient's death on Super Bowl Sunday 1998 left authorities with a nagging question: Who ultimately cared that he was gone? For weeks, a team of investigators searched for Zorn's next of kin, family members who could collect his body and remaining effects.

A man found dead in a shallow grave off the 105 Freeway was killed by a blow to the head, an Los Angeles County coroner's spokesman said Friday. The man, known only as John Doe, could be identified through dental records, said coroner's spokesman Craig Harvey. A 22-year-old transient, Bryan Petty, has been arrested in connection with the man's killing. The remains were found Sunday evening in a shallow grave off an embankment near the 105 Freeway near Bellflower Boulevard in Downey.

Orange County coroner officials will decide Monday morning when to perform an autopsy on Pastor Rick Warren's son, an official with the department said. Matthew Warren, 27, reportedly committed suicide last week. His father, a world-famous evangelist who preaches at Saddleback Church, said his son suffered emotional problems. A service in the younger Warren's memory was held Sunday. Tom Holladay, a teaching pastor at the mega-church in Lake Forest, led a prayer for the family at the 9 a.m. service, according to the Associated Press.

The can of spray paint sat on the ledge of a downtown Sacramento office tower. A tool for etching glass lay below. The body of Craig Fugate was tangled in some ropes about nine stories up the tower. Authorities on Tuesday were trying to piece together the bizarre death. They believe Fugate was somehow killed Monday while trying to vandalize the office building. "They found the spray paint where he climbed down" but no actual tags, Officer Doug Morse said. The Sacramento coroner's office is still trying to determine a cause of death.

Since at least 1989, when it was universally ridiculed for bestowing the hard rock-metal award on Jethro Tull over Metallica, the Recording Academy has lived in fear of seeming terminally out of touch. British neo-folkies Mumford & Sons won the evening's top prize, album of the year, for its earnestly hand-woven and homespun "Babel. " The irreproachably indie duo the Black Keys scored the rock song Grammy for "Lonely Boy. " Months before Sunday's awards show, R&B newcomer Frank Ocean had received a full-dress media coronation for his freshman release, "Channel Orange.

The Las Vegas police lieutenant who killed his wife, son and himself was Hans Pieter Walters, who died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head, the Clark County Office of the Coroner/Medical Examiner said in a statement Tuesday. Walters told a dispatcher Monday that he had shot his family and threatened to set his home on fire and harm any officers who responded, authorities said.  When police arrived, they found the family's Boulder City, Nev., home partially engulfed in flames and Walters in the doorway with a gun. He ignored police commands and went back into the house, authorities said.

Cocaine intoxication appears to have been "a major factor" in the death of Alesia Thomas, a woman who died shortly after she was forcibly taken into custody by several LAPD officers, the L.A. County coroner has concluded. In a report released Monday, the medical examiner who conducted the autopsy found that it was impossible to determine what role, if any, Thomas' struggle with the officers played in her death. Because of that uncertainty, the official cause of the 35-year-old woman's death was listed as "undetermined.

A weary Dr. J. L. Cogan, Los Angeles County's acting medical examiner, surveyed a command center Saturday afternoon in the basement of his agency's headquarters and concluded he was satisfied that "everything was going smoothly" in the wake of the airliner disaster at Los Angeles International Airport. "The staff handled itself in a very professional manner," Cogan said.

Nine people dead of carbon monoxide poisoning. Two people electrocuted, five suicides, three drug overdoses, two drownings and one teenage boy struck and killed by a car. That is the stark accounting of the corpses brought to the Jefferson Parish morgue run here by Dr. Robert E. Treuting, the only coroner in the New Orleans metropolitan area with an operational morgue in the days and weeks after Hurricane Katrina ravaged the Louisiana coast.

Through three decades of fevered tabloid speculation and whispers of a deeper story, the official account never changed: Natalie Wood drowned accidentally. The 43-year-old star of "West Side Story," who couldn't swim, had been drinking the night before she was found floating face-down in frigid waters off Santa Catalina Island. When the L.A. County Sheriff's Department reopened the case in November 2011, around the 30th anniversary of her death, skeptics questioned the timing and doubted whether there was anything new to be learned.