‘John Doe No. 171’ Attracts Little Attention : Busy Pedestrians Pass a Scene of Death

The decomposing body of a transient--ignored by pedestrians and a gardener who presumed the dead man was just another sleeping bum--was discovered Tuesday near one of downtown Los Angeles’ most heavily traveled intersections, police said.

“John Doe No. 171,” believed to be in his 60s, died of undetermined causes sometime during the weekend, the county coroner’s office said. An autopsy was scheduled.

In Plain Sight

On Monday, his body--lying at the foot of a rusty, unused flagpole at the county’s Central Heating and Refrigeration Plant at Temple Street and Broadway--was within sight of numerous pedestrians, police said. The intersection draws foot traffic for the county Criminal Courts Building, Hall of Records and the Hall of Justice.

The body was lying on the edge of a walkway that leads from Temple Street to a little-used plant entrance. The path is sometimes used by pedestrians who want to save a few steps, cutting diagonally from Temple to Broadway, rather than walking to the corner.

“It’s not an area where a lot of people walk, but he was really badly decomposed. I think somebody should have noticed,” Los Angeles Police Detective Gerard Wittmann said. “I talked to a gardener. He said they watered around him.”

Workers at the heating plant said a number of transients have slept in and around the area’s shrubbery for years.

Common Occurrence

Detective John Dunkin said the syndrome of citizen disinterest is a common one.

“We’ve had them (dead transients) lie on a public sidewalk for hours and hundreds of people will walk by,” he said.

Clancy Imislund, managing director of the downtown Midnight Mission, said his staff makes sure that transients who sleep near the mission are regularly awakened, “but where there’s no overview, a thing like this can happen.”

Wittmann said the dead man had been panhandling around the Temple-Broadway intersection for the past week and had been seen on Friday with an estimated $50 in change in his possession.

On Monday, some Los Angeles County sheriff’s employees who work in the nearby Hall of Justice saw the man’s body next to the flagpole “and thought nothing of it, because so many winos sleep around there,” Wittmann said. “Tuesday morning they looked and saw he was in exactly the same position” and investigated.

While police said they were certain the body had been in public view Monday, two county painters who said they made several trips along the heating plant’s walkway on Monday were equally certain the body was not there.

“We would have seen it,” one of the painters, Tad Nishikuni, said Tuesday.