It’s not important to say how I got to the website for San Francisco’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. But I will say that I was following a line of research on the number of traffic fatalities in the city going back to the 1950s or so. Just part of some history I’ve been gathering.
I forgot about that purported mission when I got to the chief medical examiner’s home page. It features sketches of deceased people the office has been unable to identify. The sketches are arresting because they take people who have been found in the worst of circumstances — dead on the street or in a park restroom, for instance — and portray them as they might well have looked in life and as their friends and loved ones might imagine them. Clearly the artist is attempting more than creating a likeness. The work here is an exercise in trying to restore dignity and humanity to those denied it at the end of their lives.
The man pictured above was found in October 2024 in a vacant downtown lot, lying in a pool of water. The medical examiner’s office released this sketch about three months later, along with a brief description of the case:
The decedent is a white male, approximately 50 years of age with brown hair and brown eyes. He is 5 feet and 6 inches tall and weighs 168 pounds. He was found in an abandoned lot that was filled with water at 348 5th Street, San Francisco. The decedent was found in the water dressed in multiple layers of clothing including an AJAX East Bay sweatshirt, a Kobe Bryant #24 jersey, and a Lakers #8 jersey.
Several news outlets around town duly published the sketch and the medical examiner’s press release, which noted that this was a rare case of it being unable to identify a decedent. Sometimes, publishing the sketches pays off with a relatively quick identification. Late last year, a woman lying unresponsive on a downtown street was identified just a few days after her drawing was posted; in late 2023, it took about three weeks before someone supplied a name for a man who’d been found dead on the roof of a parking garage.
So far, though, the man found lying in the water wearing the Kobe Bryant jersey remains unknown.