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Undetermined: A suspicious death at Green Lake, an investigation's limits
Published November 22, 2020
It was just after 4 p.m. on Aug. 30, 2019. A police officer arrived within minutes. He waded into the water through the milfoil, stumbling over the rocky lake bed until he reached the body. It was a young woman, her vest zipped all the way up.
The officer and a firefighter struggled with the zipper, forcing it open and revealing shoelaces bound around her neck. Autumn Lee Stone, 23 years old, mother of a toddler and a newborn, had been strangled to death.
How she came to be floating 20 yards from shore — in one of the city’s most popular parks, on a crowded day, in the middle of a Friday afternoon — led Seattle police detectives to consider foul play. But not for long.
Almost immediately, they formed a theory. Autumn was fully clothed except for her shoes, which investigators found without laces some distance apart in the bushes near where she was pulled ashore. Police saw no sign of a struggle and concluded she had no “defensive injuries.”
An hour after the 911 call, a police spokesman told a Seattle Times reporter that the death in Green Lake was probably a suicide. No witnesses came forward to report anything unusual. The lead detective later obtained what he considered a suicide note. Two weeks after Autumn’s death, he closed the case.
This level of certainty on how Autumn died is not widely shared outside the police department. Not by friends and family members who were in touch with her hours before her death. Not by a firefighter who tried to revive her. Not by independent forensic experts who reviewed case records on behalf of The Times.
And not by the King County Medical Examiner’s Office, the authority on how a person died, which found she’d been strangled to death but could not determine by whom. Of roughly 2,300 deaths that Seattle police responded to since 2017, the medical examiner hasn’t been able to determine the manner of death in less than 3% of cases. Autumn Stone’s death is among this small number, where the official ruling on how she died is “undetermined.”
ETA: See link for an extensive report...
Published November 22, 2020
It was just after 4 p.m. on Aug. 30, 2019. A police officer arrived within minutes. He waded into the water through the milfoil, stumbling over the rocky lake bed until he reached the body. It was a young woman, her vest zipped all the way up.
The officer and a firefighter struggled with the zipper, forcing it open and revealing shoelaces bound around her neck. Autumn Lee Stone, 23 years old, mother of a toddler and a newborn, had been strangled to death.
How she came to be floating 20 yards from shore — in one of the city’s most popular parks, on a crowded day, in the middle of a Friday afternoon — led Seattle police detectives to consider foul play. But not for long.
Almost immediately, they formed a theory. Autumn was fully clothed except for her shoes, which investigators found without laces some distance apart in the bushes near where she was pulled ashore. Police saw no sign of a struggle and concluded she had no “defensive injuries.”
An hour after the 911 call, a police spokesman told a Seattle Times reporter that the death in Green Lake was probably a suicide. No witnesses came forward to report anything unusual. The lead detective later obtained what he considered a suicide note. Two weeks after Autumn’s death, he closed the case.
This level of certainty on how Autumn died is not widely shared outside the police department. Not by friends and family members who were in touch with her hours before her death. Not by a firefighter who tried to revive her. Not by independent forensic experts who reviewed case records on behalf of The Times.
And not by the King County Medical Examiner’s Office, the authority on how a person died, which found she’d been strangled to death but could not determine by whom. Of roughly 2,300 deaths that Seattle police responded to since 2017, the medical examiner hasn’t been able to determine the manner of death in less than 3% of cases. Autumn Stone’s death is among this small number, where the official ruling on how she died is “undetermined.”
ETA: See link for an extensive report...
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