Victim in Murder Probe Identified

Authorities on Sunday identified Mark Alan Schwartz, a 25-year-old West Hollywood resident, as the dead man in a homicide investigation involving actor James Caan.

A Los Angeles County coroner’s spokesman said autopsy results were not available, but it appeared to investigators that Schwartz died from multiple traumatic injuries sustained when he plunged from the eighth-floor balcony of an apartment in the 10000 block of Wilshire Boulevard early Saturday.

Although some residents of the apartment house had speculated that Schwartz had been shot, coroner’s investigators observed no gunshot wound, the spokesman said.

On Saturday, Caan was questioned for hours by police as a witness in connection with what they described as Schwartz’s possible murder. The actor was released.

Caan has not commented on his connection with the investigation. Paul Bloch, Caan’s spokesman at the public relations firm of Rogers & Cowan, did not respond to messages left with his answering service Sunday.

Police have not clarified Caan’s connection. They have said that Schwartz “may have been associated with the tenant” of an eighth-floor apartment and that Caan also had some unspecified link to that apartment.

The Los Angeles Police Department’s elite robbery-homicide division has been assigned to the case. Detectives there declined to comment Sunday.