Man who died after being found on Petaluma sidewalk may have fallen

The death Tuesday night of a 60-year-old Petaluma-area homeless man found unconscious on a downtown sidewalk looked less like a homicide and more like a fall, police said Wednesday, as detectives continued efforts to determine what happened.

He appeared to have a small cut on his forehead and some bruising, Petaluma Police Lt. Danny Fish said. There were no other obvious signs of trauma, but the man won’t be closely examined until an autopsy is performed Friday.

What happened remained unclear and detectives are investigating the death as a homicide until they rule that out, said Sgt. Ed Crosby, who supervises violent crime investigations for Petaluma police.

“We don’t know what happened. There’s no video, no witnesses. The injuries could be consistent with a fall,” Fish said. “But how that fall occurred is something we don’t know yet.”

Detectives on Wednesday were retracing the man’s steps. “We’re filling in that back story as well as finding witnesses and (surveillance) video to give us some clues,” Crosby said.

The man’s name wasn’t released Wednesday. While police didn’t believe he had family in the area, Sonoma County coroner’s investigators were trying to find a relative.

The man represents the eighth report of a homeless person found dead in Petaluma this year and the 21st reported homeless death since 2010, according to police records.

It’s a startling number that police officials have said is due in large part to the large homeless population in town.

Petaluma police officers knew the man. He’d lived in various homeless camps in the area for years, longer than many of Petaluma’s other homeless. He also was frequently seen downtown, and interactions with officers at times involved allegations the man was drunk in public or trespassing.

“He’s a very well-known local transient. We have had interactions with him on a number of occasions, criminal and non-criminal,” Fish said.

Sgt. Crosby said the death doesn’t follow the pattern of many of the other homeless deaths, which mainly involved men being found in more rural areas and without obvious injuries.

“What’s different about this case, than the others, is he was found right in the middle of downtown” and that he had an injury, Crosby said.

At about 7:30 p.m. Tuesday a passer-by found him face down, bleeding from a head wound, on the sidewalk at B Street and Petaluma Boulevard and called 911.

The man was unresponsive and the caller didn’t think he was breathing. Petaluma fire paramedics performed CPR and apparently were able to restore a light pulse, according to initial reports. However, the man died either on the way to a hospital or while there.

He was found near the parking lot of a 24 Hour Fitness gym. While not brightly lit, the area was fairly busy with people, Fish said.

“If there had been a fight, I can guarantee we’d have been getting 911 calls. The 24 Hour Fitness had a packed house, with people coming and going to the gym,” he said.

The man was found in a blind spot as far as business surveillance videos go. Detectives on Wednesday established from cameras on nearby stores that he was walking south toward where he eventually was found. The video did not show him fall, or reveal any type of confrontation, Crosby said. It showed him at 7:19 p.m. and the call to 911 came in about 5 to 6 minutes later.

For hours Tuesday night, police had the area cordoned off for the investigation. Pop-up tents protected the body and police from the heavy rain and a police command vehicle blocked off a lane in the heart of downtown to allow more room for police to maneuver.

It was less than a month since the last investigation of a death of a homeless person. On Nov. 23, Leonard Smith, 63, was found not far from downtown, by a park bench near the Petaluma River.

Smith, who’d recently returned to Petaluma, died of natural causes, according to the death investigation. But he was acutely drunk when he died, according to recently completed toxicology reports.

“Alcohol is a consistent factor in just about every death,” Crosby said.

While two of the more recent autopsy reports remain unfinished, the rest show deaths due to natural causes, suicide or accidental overdosing, he said.

In this latest death, Lt. Fish asked witnesses or anyone with information to call Detective Joel Stemmer at 778-4532.

You can reach Staff Writer Eloísa Ruano González at 521-5458 or eloisa.gonzalez@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @eloisanews.