A maintenance worker who found a young woman’s body in a water tank atop the former Cecil Hotel in 2013 says in new court papers that guest complaints of poor water pressure led him to inspect one of the four cisterns and make the gruesome discovery.
Santiago Lopez, who has worked at the downtown establishment since 2010, said his only previous familiarity with the name Elisa Lam occurred when he opened guest room doors to assist police with their missing-person investigation concerning the 21-year-old Vancouver, B.C. resident. Lam’s parents, David and Yinna Lam, filed a wrongful death suit in Los Angeles Superior Court in September 2013 against the hotel, which was built in the 1920s and has since been renamed Stay on Main.
Defense attorneys have filed a motion to dismiss the case, arguing that no previous incident had occurred in the hotel’s long history and that what happened to Lam was not foreseeable. The hotel’s lawyers also say it is still unknown Lam got into the tank.
Lam was staying at the hotel while on a holiday trip to California. Her body was found on Feb. 19, 2013. The LAPD searched the roof earlier while investigating her disappearance, but did not check the tanks.
According to Lopez, after taking an elevator to the 15th floor, he walked up stairs to the rooftop. He says he deactivated the rooftop alarm, climbed up the platform upon which the tanks sat and then scaled yet another ladder that took him to the top of the main water tank.
“I noticed that the hatch to the main water tank was open and looked inside and saw an Asian woman lying face-up in the water approximately 12 inches from the top of the tank,” Lopez said.
He said the rooftop alarm appeared to be in good working order and that he did not recall hearing it activated in the weeks before Lam’s death.
“During my employment at the … hotel, other than the incident with Ms. Lam, I am unaware of any instances of unauthorized access to any of the rooftop water tanks by anyone, including hotel guests,” Lopez states.
In a separate declaration, Pedro Tovar, who is Lopez’s supervisor and the hotel’s chief engineer, said three fire escapes accessible through interior doors and a staircase from the 14th floor are the only ways to reach the roof. If the alarm is not shut off before someone enters the rooftop, it emits a shrill sound which can be heard on the 14th and 15th floors and also rings at the front desk, Tovar says.
To get into any of the four 1,000-gallon tanks, one has to climb a ladder onto a platform, squeeze through tanks and plumbing equipment to reach another ladder and then climb onto one of the cisterns, each of which have heavy metal lids, according to Tovar.
Tovar says he has worked at the hotel for 30 years and, like Lopez, has never heard of anyone, including hotel guests, being injured at or near the water tanks.
The coroner’s office concluded Lam’s death did not involve foul play and was an accidental drowning with bipolar disorder as a contributing factor, according to the hotel attorneys’ court papers.
“Based on the nearly 100-year history of the hotel, there was simply no reason to expect anyone … would approach the water tanks for unauthorized purposes,” the hotel’s attorneys state in their court papers. “Elisa … was the first person to every be injured as a result of the water tanks.”
But according to the lawsuit, the hotel operators had an obligation to make the premises safe for Lam and “inspect and seek out hazards in the hotel that presented an unreasonable risk of danger to (Lam) and other hotel guests.”
Lam was last seen Jan. 31, 2013, at the hotel, which is near skid row. Surveillance video footage showed her behaving oddly in a hotel elevator. Her case drew interest in China, where the video went viral, and other Asian countries as well as the United States and Canada.
A hearing on the defense attorneys’ dismissal motion is scheduled Dec. 14.
— Wire reports