Gone at Midnight. Jake Anderson
been triggered in the time Santiago worked at the Cecil, so he didn’t know what it actually sounded like or if it worked at all.
Besides the emergency fire escapes, the access door was the only path to the hotel’s roof.
In his sworn testimony later given to the Superior Court of the State of California, Lopez confirmed that on the date of his inspection, the rooftop alarm was in working condition before he deactivated it in order to proceed to a flat, gray nondescript slab of concrete. There he observed four 1,000 gallon water cisterns clustered together at the edge of the hotel like cylindrical gargoyles overlooking downtown Los Angeles. A gravity-based system pumped water from a main water line below street level upward into the cisterns, supplying all of the hotel’s drinkable and potable water.
Each tower was ten feet tall and six feet in diameter. Situated on a four-foot platform, accessing, much less servicing them, was not easy. He ascended a narrow ladder to the first platform; to reach it he had to slither between the tanks and plumbing equipment. That brought him to a second ladder that he scaled alongside the tank itself and that delivered him to the top.
The first thing he noticed, he would later testify, was that the lid to one of the tanks was open. Each cistern lid was 18” by 18” and quite heavy. What the hell was it doing open? The police had been on the roof looking for the missing woman—could they have left it open?
Rising to his feet, Santiago dusted off the grime that accumulated on his pants during the climb and took in an eagle-eye view of downtown Los Angeles and beyond—a decollage of shadowy structures under a salmon-colored late afternoon sky crossed and dotted with contrails, drones, and helicopters.
He looked down into the open lid. Recessed in the dark cistern, something caught his eye—a color where there should be none. The color red.
As he later reported to the hotel manager, detectives and court officials, when Santiago looked inside he saw the body of a woman floating face-up in the water, approximately twelve inches from the top. After nearly two weeks submerged, her left eye was bulging and skin slippage had warped her face into something ghoulish. The woman’s clothes, including a red hoodie, floated beside her.
CHAPTER 3
The Investigation Begins
AUTHORITIES RECEIVED A CALL from Cecil Hotel management shortly after 10 A.M. on February 19. The Los Angeles Police Department, according to Officer Diana Figueroa, dispatched officers to 640 South Main Street shortly thereafter. Captain Jaime Moore of the L.A. Fire Department said his department received a separate call from the hotel management reporting that their maintenance staff had discovered a body.
Upon arriving at and inspecting the scene, Moore stated: “There are three of these tanks, inside a portal, with sealed water cisterns on the roof. The body is inside one of these tanks.”
He had mistaken the number of tanks (there were four) and it isn’t known which tank he was referring to when he called it “sealed.” Virtually every later report would state that the water tank lids were not sealed. Were these reports wrong? Had Elisa been sealed in?
Moore said that the size of the hatch granting entrance was too narrow to accommodate the equipment necessary for removing the body. Subsequently, the tank was drained and cut open from the side with lasers.
At approximately 1:45 P.M., LAPD Officer Bruce Borihanh confirmed that a body had been found inside one of four rooftop water tanks of the Cecil Hotel.
“Our urban search and rescue team is working on the best method to recover the body and maintain as much . . . evidence as they possibly can to support the investigation that’s being done by the LAPD and robbery/homicide investigators,” said LAPD spokesman Sgt. Rudy Lopez.
That the tank had to be cut open from the side with lasers underscores the exceedingly awkward physical dimensions of the rooftop platform where the tanks stood. It was partially an effort on behalf of law enforcement to preserve the state of the body from any nicks and cuts that may arise from dredging it upward through an 18” by 18” opening. Pictures from the scene show a phalanx of firefighters and law enforcement officials spilling off the sides of the water cistern platform and huddled on the control room roof above the tanks.
The grim tableau served as a reminder as to why it was so strange that a body was discovered there. That Elisa, or indeed anyone, had somehow accessed the cistern struck many as borderline incomprehensible, a mystery worthy of Sherlock Holmes. The coming debate over whether the task was even physically possible for Elisa, who in the videotape was manifestly disconcerted and missing her glasses, was just getting started online, as well as the equally important adjoining question of why she would have sought access in the first place.
Later that day, Elisa’s parents confirmed the body was hers.
At 4:36 P.M. Coroner Supervising Investigator Fred Corral notified Senior Criminalist Mark Schuchardt that a criminalist would be needed once the decedent’s body arrived at the Forensic Science Center.
Under an hour later, Mr. Schuchardt was staring at Elisa’s body, which lay supine on a service table in an advanced state of decomposition, with bloating, marbling and discoloration to the face, abdomen, and upper legs. The hands and feet were waterlogged, which did not surprise him once he learned the body had been submerged in a water tank for days or weeks. The woman’s soaking wet clothes lay next to her along with a wristwatch and a hotel key card, which had also been submerged.
Mark collected forensic evidence until 6:50 P.M., at which point the clothing and other personal effects were bagged and placed into evidence.
This information, as well as the additional fibers and debris found on the clothes, would not be publicly disclosed for another six months, when the full autopsy and toxicology reports were released. Other details, some of them critically important, would not be revealed until the next year. Some of them were not ever revealed.
CONTAMINATED WATER
Of the many simultaneous investigations that began that day, the one most devoured by local news concerned the LA County Department of Public Health, which sought to determine if the Cecil Hotel drinking water was safe for consumption. While they awaited the results of this investigation, public health officials with LA County’s Environmental Health department temporarily condemned the Cecil Hotel’s water supply and issued a “Do Not Drink” order.
Suddenly there were news reports about infected water. Eighty-nine-year-old Cecil Hotel resident Bernard Diaz, who had lived in the hotel for thirty-two years, said management did not tell him about the water situation. He and others only found out that the health department was quarantining the water supply while watching the news. An hour later, Diaz said, a news anchor on KTLA announced that a body had been found in one of the water cisterns on the roof of the building where he lived. Imagine finding out on the 6 o’clock news that your drinking water has been contaminated by a dead body.
Tenants and short-term residents who had stayed at the hotel recalled instances of water coming out of the faucets and showerheads dark, discolored and, in some cases, containing sediment; they realized in horror that for nearly two weeks they had drunk, brushed their teeth with, and bathed in corpse water.
“The moment we found out, we felt a bit sick to the stomach, quite literally, especially having drank the water, we’re not well mentally,” said Mr. Baugh, a British tourist.
Another tenant described the taste of the water to news reporters as almost “sweet.”
“The water did have a funny taste,” said Sabrina Baugh, who had been drinking the water for eight days. “We never thought anything of it. We thought it was just the way it was here.”
Terrance Powell, a director at LA’s Department of Public Health, said the size of the water cistern and the presence of chlorine in most Los Angeles public water made the likelihood of contamination pretty small, but he could not rule it out.
“Our biggest concern is going to be fecal contamination because of the body in the water,” Powell told reporters.
When