Police identify suspect in body-parts killing
A man who had drifted far from home and family was arrested early Saturday in connection with the grisly slaying of the still-unidentified man whose chopped-up body was discovered in and around a dumped suitcase South of Market.
Mark Jeffrey Andrus was booked into San Francisco jail at 2:24 a.m. on suspicion of one count of murder, records show. Police said he is 59, but jail records give his age as 54. He is being held without bail.
Andrus was arrested days after a man’s dismembered body was found Wednesday, with parts stuffed into a suitcase and others scattered nearby at 11th and Market streets. The victim has not been identified, and authorities did not
say Saturday how the man had died.
Andrus’ family described him as a man they’d lost touch with in recent years.
He had “challenges” and run-ins with the law, kept “very much to himself,” and drifted so far from relatives that they didn’t know where he was or how to reach him, said Helen Andrus of Spokane, Wash., who is married to Mark Andrus’ older brother, Jon.
“We haven’t heard from him in, oh my gosh, years and years and years,” Helen Andrus said. “My husband at one point tried to reach out and find him, but I’m guessing it’s been 20 years now since we last saw him.”
Told of his arrest, Helen Andrus said, “Oh Lord, oh my God. That’s horrible.”
Andrus was taken into custody around 7:30 p.m. Friday at an apartment building at 430 Turk St. in the Tenderloin after police received an anonymous tip as to his whereabouts. They descended on the building a few hours after distributing a photo of a “person of interest” in the gruesome case.
Surveillance camera footage showed the man in the area where the suitcase was discovered outside a Goodwill’s As-Is Store, 86th 11th St. The grainy footage showed a man wearing a striped baseball cap, light blue jeans and a blue and orange jacket.
A passerby spotted the body parts about 4:15 p.m. Wednesday on 11th Street just south of Market. The roller-type suitcase and severed appendages were mixed in with garbage and debris near the entrance to the store.
Officers who scoured the area found more body parts nearby, but the victim’s head, lower arms and hands are still missing.
The San Francisco medical examiner said Friday that the remains were those of a “lightskinned male” but said his identity and cause and manner of death were still not known.
In addition to the murder count, Andrus was being held on five outstanding traffic warrants, records show.
Online court records show Andrus had arrests in Missoula, Mont., in the 1980s and ’90s for suspected drug possession, theft, burglary and bail jumping. He had a peace sign tattooed on his right knee, according to the records. Andrus grew up in Missoula and has spent much of his adult life there.
In 1988, he and a second inmate at the Missoula County Jail petitioned the Montana Supreme Court, claiming they were “denied adequate food, shelter, clothing, medical care, exercise, individual security, and a law library,” according to court records. The suit was dismissed.
In San Francisco, Andrus lived in the Tenderloin at the Krupa Hotel at 700 Jones St. for a period of time. A manager at the hotel said Andrus, whom she described as a small man, lived there for “two to three” years with a friend. The men helped her out a lot by doing such things as taking out the garbage, she said. He left the residence in 2010 or 2011, she added.