Autopsy fails to determine cause of B.C. woman’s death at L.A. hotel

LOS ANGELES — An autopsy on a Canadian tourist’s body failed to determine whether she was killed or died accidentally in a giant water cistern on top of a downtown Los Angeles hotel roof.

The results were inconclusive, so coroner’s officials said they will have to wait for toxicological tests to determine a cause of death for Elisa Lam, 21, of Vancouver.

Police have called her death suspicious.

Lam’s body was found Tuesday in one of several water cisterns on top of the 600-room hotel near Skid Row.

The hotel has retained a consult- ant who submitted a plan to sanitize the water lines that will be retested before they are put back into operation, said Angelo Bellomo, the county’s director of environmental health.

Only water for toilets is flowing for hotel guests who chose to stay at the hotel. Most have made other arrangements.

Guest complaints about low water pressure prompted a maintenance worker to make the gruesome discovery.

Before she died, hotel surveillance footage showed her inside an elevator pushing buttons and sticking her head out the doors, looking in both directions.

Water tested from the hotel didn’t contain any live bacteria that would cause illness.

County health officials issued a do-not-drink order, but results that came back Thursday indicated the water was safe from a “microbiological standpoint,” Bellomo said.

“We can’t say what the quality of the water was prior to the samples” taken Tuesday, Bellomo said. “We can only say that the water met the standard at the time it was sampled.”

Chlorine in the water probably killed any bacteria in the tank where Lam’s body was found, Bellomo said.

Lam travelled alone to Los Angeles on Jan. 26 and was last seen five days later by hotel workers.