Man’s body found stuffed in suitcase in lake on Halloween
A murdered man’s body was discovered stuffed in a suitcase pulled out of a popular lake in Oakland, California, on Halloween.
Volunteers were cleaning Lake Merritt on Tuesday morning when they spotted a suitcase floating at the edge of it.
‘We kind of pulled it towards us closer using these net poles,’ Kevin Shomo, a volunteer with the Lake Merritt Institute, told KTVU.
‘We grabbed one end and we realized it was too heavy. So we pulled it close enough to us and we said, “Oh wow, this thing is heavy,” so we unzipped it and that’s what we found.’
The man was inside the suitcase ‘kind of like in a fetal position’, Shomo said.
He looked like he was in his 30s, the volunteer added.
Investigators with the homicide unit and Alameda County Coroner’s Bureau examined the scene.
‘Part of the investigation is trying to determine where the body could have floated from,’ Oakland police Capt Alan Yu told the TV station. ‘It could be any part of the lake, and we’re looking at all those possible outcomes.’
An onlooker, Angela Massella, said she saw the unfamiliar object around 8am.
‘I saw something, a little piece like this, but not the whole suitcase, only a little piece like that,’ she told KTVU.
‘It’s really scary for me, for a body to be around neighborhood here, it’s really scary.’
The man’s identity has not yet been revealed.
Lake Merritt is ‘the jewel of Oakland’ and the oldest designated wildlife refuge in the US, according to the city’s website.
The tidal lagoon has a three-mile ‘Necklace of Lights shoreline in the center of an exceptionally diverse city’ and ‘is a special place where nature and nurture migrate and mingle daily’, states lakemerritt.org.
The suitcase was found just a couple months after a man’s body was found crammed into a barrel at Malibu Lagoon State Beach in California. A lifeguard spotted the barrel and made the grisly discovery.
‘It didn’t look decomposed or like it had been there for a long time,’ Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department Lt Hugo Raynaga told KTLA at the time.
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