A golfer at a Los Angeles County course discovered the badly decomposed body of a young girl floating in a waterway this week, followed hours later by a second corpse found in the same channel.
The discoveries came Tuesday and Wednesday along the Dominguez Channel, a 15.7-mile waterway cutting through southern LA County. The girl, estimated at 6 to 12 years old, was spotted first by a golfer at the Victoria Golf Course in Carson who called police. She weighed between 60 and 85 pounds, stood 4-foot-4 to 4-foot-8, and had brown eyes with short dark brown or black hair. She was pronounced dead at the scene.
A day later, workers at a nearby refinery spotted a man’s body in the same channel. Authorities estimated the black male, between 50 and 60 years old, had been dead for less than 24 hours. Unlike the child’s remains, his showed no obvious signs of trauma.
Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department officials addressed the dual discoveries at a Thursday press conference, stressing the limited connections between the cases. The only similarity, they said, is that both bodies surfaced in the Dominguez Channel — but miles apart from each other. Police have not identified either person, and autopsies are pending for both to determine cause of death.
John Hollaway, who exercises regularly near the channel, encountered the crime scene during his routine and spoke with ABC 7 about the unsettling sight.
“I was going over the [Del Amo Boulevard Bridge] and when I was coming back over, that’s when I saw the yellow tape … and when you see yellow tape, you kind of know what it is,” Hollaway said.
He continued, “I started to get off and look down there. I just didn’t want that memory etched in my head, especially now knowing it was a child now.”
The Dominguez Channel runs through an industrial stretch of southern Los Angeles County, passing near refineries, golf courses, and residential areas. The waterway has long served as a drainage channel for the region, making it a known but generally unremarkable feature of the local landscape until this week’s grim findings.
The back-to-back discoveries have rattled the Carson area, where residents now confront questions about how two bodies — one a child, one a middle-aged man — ended up in the same waterway within a day of each other. Sheriff’s officials have not indicated whether they suspect foul play in either case, pending the results of the scheduled autopsies.