Ex-chancellor in hospital before suicide

A former University of California chancellor was discharged from a psychiatric hospital just a day before she plummeted to her death from a city apartment building, according to a report released Friday.

Denice Dee Denton, 46, committed suicide June 24 by jumping from the roof of the 43-story Paramount high-rise, according to a San Francisco medical examiner’s investigation.

An autopsy determined that the onetime UC Santa Cruz chancellor died from massive injuries after landing on the 10th-floor terrace of a parking garage.

Denton was suffering from severe depression and had spent the six days before her death at Langley Porter Psychiatric Institute in San Francisco, the report said. Her doctor had prescribed her the antidepressant Zoloft and the sleep aid Ambien, and antidepressants were present in her system when she died.

Denton came under fire in the two years before her death for demanding expensive remodeling to her campus home and for helping her partner secure a top-paying university position.

Records show that Denton’s longtime partner, Gretchen Kalonji, had an apartment in the Paramount.

Denton’s mother, Carolyn Mabee, told investigators that her daughter “was under severe stress” from her job and her relationship with her partner, the report said.

Mabee said Denton was “acting completely irrationally” after being picked up from the hospital and believed “that the police had been chasing her,” according to the report.

Mabee drove her daughter to the Paramount to pick up her purse from Kalonji’s apartment. Denton took off running on the 41st floor, and her mother could not keep up with her, the report said. Mabee spent the next few hours searching for her daughter but did not see her alive again.