Human Skull Washes Ashore

Santa Monica resident Joe Mifsud was at Coastline beach, across from the Getty Villa, on February 16, when he saw a skull in the rocks. ‘Oh, my god, it’s a human skull,’ Mifsud thought and he later told the Palisadian-Post, ‘I knew it was real.’ He ran to his car, grabbed his cell phone and called 911 to report that he had found a skull. Then he waited. ‘In a little bit, I saw three red-and-white helicopters come over and I thought that they were coming because of my call, but they flew over,’ said Mifsud who works for Palisadian architect James R. Stewart. After 45 minutes, no one had come, so he called 911 again and repeated, ‘There is a human skull on the beach.’ The 911 operator told him that there was no record of his call. ‘Do you think I’m joking?’ Mifsud asked. ‘I just don’t call 911 for a prank. There’s a skull.’ The operator advised him to retrieve the skull, before it washed back into the ocean. Mifsud went to the rocks, found a stick and picked the skull up with that stick and continued to wait. Finally two Malibu patrol cars arrived. When the officers saw the skull, which was missing teeth and a lower jawbone, they called homicide. ‘They didn’t seem prepared because they didn’t have a bag to put the skull into,’ Mifsud said. He was told that the skull had to be placed in a paper bag rather than a plastic one because of contamination, so he got one out of his trunk and gave it to the officers. Mifsud was told the reason for the 911-response delay was due to the location of that beach, which is on the borderline of city and county call areas. LAPD Homicide Detective Mark Lillienfeld called Mifsud the following Wednesday and a coroner’s team went to the beach to meet with Mifsud, who showed them the location he found the skull. No additional bones were found. Los Angeles Sheriff’s Homicide Detective Mark Lillienfeld, who was in charge of the investigation, was contacted by the Post. ‘It looks real,’ he said, ‘but we don’t know if it’s real or not until the anthropologist in the coroner’s office takes a look at it.’ The skull was sent to the office the third week in February, but it took several weeks for a result because of caseload volume at the L.A. County Coroner’s office. According to Lillienfeld, it is the largest in the world, performing more than 10,000 autopsies a year– the next closest is New York City with 5,000. On March 13, Lillienfeld had the report. ‘It was an adult male, most likely African or Asian American,’ he said. ‘The longest amount of time the skull has been in the water is at least six months, but not more than two years.’ He said there were no marks on the skull that would indicate cause of death, so it was listed as ’cause of death unknown.’ The skull was sent to the California Department of Justice DNA lab in Sacramento to see if DNA can be extracted that can be matched to men who are missing or were unidentified.