Workers Find Severed Arms of Woman at Beach, Marina

County workers Monday found two severed arms, one at the southern tip of Venice Beach and the other floating nearby in Basin H of the Marina del Rey pleasure boat harbor.

The limbs, which had been in the water for less than a day, appeared to be those of a Caucasian woman, said Los Angeles Police Department Lt. Wallace Graves. An air and sea search failed to turn up any more body parts.

“Right now we’re assuming the worst and proceeding as though it was a homicide, but that doesn’t mean that it is,” Graves said.

In Monday’s heavy rainfall, the limbs may have washed down the Ballona Creek storm drainage channel and been blown back toward the marina by southeasterly winds, said Randy DeGregori, assistant chief of the Los Angeles County Lifeguard Service.

However, he said, “There’s a tremendous amount of discharge on all the flood channels when you have rains like this. Where anything originated from is anybody’s guess.”

The mouth of Ballona Creek, which drains rainwater from much of the Westside, lies just south of the marina’s entrance channel.

A beach maintenance worker found one arm in the sand just to the north of the channel about 7:45 a.m., DeGregori said. Another worker found the second arm while clearing the water near boat slip 101 at 11:10 a.m.

“They were, of course, a little bit shocked and disturbed to see it,” DeGregori said.

Scott Carrier, a spokesman for the Los Angeles County coroner’s office, said an examination had not been concluded as of Monday afternoon. A staff pathologist told him that seawater may have damaged the limbs beyond any chance of identification, he said.