San Francisco’s Medical Examiner is refusing to rule the gruesome June 2 death of French national Hugues de la Plaza a homicide, releasing an autopsy only recently after the man’s friends and family waited six months for its conclusion.
There’s no doubt de la Plaza’s life ended due to multiple stab wounds, but the December report describes the manner of his death, i.e. who wielded the knife, as “undetermined.”
Assistant medical examiner Venus Azar admits that no one close to him was aware of any suicidal inclination on his part, and therefore, it was not possible for her to rule out homicide. But the scene at his apartment where he was found “was not inconsistent with self-inflicted stab wounds,” she wrote (our emphasis).
The Guardian reported in September that no obvious weapon or suicide note was found at de la Plaza’s small Linden Street apartment in Hayes Valley where his body was discovered. A neighbor told us he heard a distinct set of footsteps running away from the apartment shortly after de la Plaza’s front door slammed three times around 2:30 in the morning.
The neighbor, Orion Denley, said the questions asked of him by police all revolved around whether or not de la Plaza suffered from depression, one of many clear indications that the San Francisco Police Department believed from the start that de la Plaza took his own life.
“It’s fucked-up in retrospect,” Denley told us at the time. “I kept thinking, ‘How come they aren’t asking me if I heard anything?’ All they did was ask over and over again if he was suicidal, like they had already made up their minds that he had committed suicide.”