Coroner Delays Ruling on Death of Boy

A 14-year-old boy found dead in an apartment complex had apparently been beaten with fists, kicked and hit with weapons, the Los Angeles County coroner’s office said Monday, but delayed officially ruling the death a homicide.

“It appears that he had injuries inflicted both by a human and a weapon,” said coroner’s office spokesman Craig Harvey.

Nonetheless, said Harvey, chief of the investigation division for the coroner’s office, more work by the medical examiner was needed to declare the death of Seiichi Yamamura a homicide.

Seiichi’s badly beaten body was discovered by two tenants in the ViewPointe apartments, a gated complex in the 20500 block of Ventura Boulevard, about 4 a.m. Sunday.

His parents said the boy had left the family’s apartment in the complex two hours earlier. After realizing he was gone, the parents and his older sister went looking for him and encountered police officers who had just been called to the building to investigate the discovery of a teenage boy’s body.

With no witnesses and no suspected motive, detectives are still trying to piece together what happened after the teenager left his apartment, said Det. Rick Swanston, lead homicide investigator at the West Valley Division.

An autopsy might help that effort, Swanston said.

Harvey said extra time is necessary to determine what type of wounds Seiichi suffered and how they contributed to his death. “If a person stomped him, then we would need to carefully look at say, the shoes, to see what type or size of shoe was used.”

The ViewPointe apartments is the same complex where the body of 8-year-old Nicole Parker was found in a suitcase in a closet in 1993. Homman Ashkan Panah, a resident at the time, was arrested, found guilty and sentenced to death for the girl’s murder.