Irvine

Body Found in Ditch: A man’s body was found in a drainage ditch paralleling Bonita Canyon Road on Thursday by a highway cleanup crew, and police are investigating the case as a homicide. An autopsy was scheduled for today, Police Sgt. Dick Bowman said. The county coroner’s office is checking fingerprints and possibly dental charts in efforts to identify the man and determine how long the body had been in the ditch, Bowman said. Bowman estimated that the man had been dead about 12 or 13 hours. “It was not the mayor, or anyone else we recognized,” Bowman said. A member of a road crew discovered the clothed body about 10:15 a.m. about 10 yards off Bonita Canyon Road and a quarter mile south of MacArthur Boulevard, police said. The body had not been bound or wrapped in anything, Bowman said, and there were no obvious signs of a cause of death.