Autopsy fails to find Los Angeles tank death cause
Autopsy fails to find Los Angeles tank death cause
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Water lines are being sanitized at a downtown Los Angeles hotel where a Canadian tourist’s body was found, even though tests suggested the water was fine and an official cause of death hasn’t been determined.
The body of Elisa Lam, 21, was found Tuesday in one of several water cisterns on top of the 600-room hotel near Skid Row.
The hotel has retained a consultant who submitted a plan to sanitize the water lines that will be retested before they are put back into operation, said Angelo Bellomo, the county’s director of environmental health.
Only water for toilets is flowing for hotel guests who chose to stay at the hotel.
Meanwhile, an autopsy performed Thursday failed to tell authorities whether Lam was killed or fell in some kind of bizarre accident. Coroner’s officials said they would wait for toxicology test results before making a final determination.
Police have called her death suspicious.
Guest complaints about low water pressure prompted a maintenance worker to make the gruesome discovery.
Before she died, hotel surveillance footage showed her inside an elevator pushing buttons and sticking her head out the doors, looking in both directions.
Water tested from the hotel didn’t contain any live bacteria that would cause illness.
County health officials issued a do-not-drink order, but results that came back Thursday indicated the water was safe from a “microbiological standpoint,” Bellomo said.
“We can’t say what the quality of the water was prior to the samples” taken Tuesday, Bellomo said. “We can only say that the water met the standard at the time it was sampled.”