SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA / A news summary : The Local Review / DEVELOPMENTS IN LOS ANGELES COUNTY : Woman Falls to Her Death at UCLA Hospital
Police are investigating the death early Wednesday of a UCLA Medical Center patient who plummeted five stories from an open-air stairway landing.
The woman, 31, was a patient in the hospital’s intensive care unit. David Langness, a medical center spokesman, said the woman apparently wandered from the sixth-floor unit around 6:30 a.m., and was discovered moments later lying on a roof below the landing.
Police don’t know if her death was an accident or suicide. They and hospital officials declined to release her identity.
The stairway landing is surrounded by a waist-high railing in the medical center’s east ward. Langness said the woman left her bed unseen, and that no hospital staff saw her fall.
“We may never really know what happened,” he said.
Hospital staff had notified police when they discovered the woman missing, and notified them again when they found her body.
Officials would not say why the woman had been hospitalized. Although she was in the intensive care unit, Langness said, the patient was not confined to a bed. “She was conscious and ambulatory,” he said.
Start your day right
Sign up for Essential California for news, features and recommendations from the L.A. Times and beyond in your inbox six days a week.
You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.
