A high-ranking official with the San Francisco medical examiner’s office allegedly chucked a human skull needed to identify a corpse in the trash — and ousted the well-meaning employee who reported his gaffe.
David Serrano Sewell, the executive director of San Francisco’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, “inexplicably” trashed the vital evidence during a rushed clean-up ahead of an inspection, axed employee Sonia Kominek-Adachi alleged in a lawsuit filed on Feb. 2.
Kominek-Adachi caught Serrano Sewell’s alleged mistake when she was doing an inventory of body parts stored in the office in January 2023 and realized an unidentified corpse, labeled “Doe #82,” was missing its head.
The office was legally required to keep the skull until they identified the Doe.
Serrano Sewell was promoted to the office’s executive director just one month earlier, according to his LinkedIn.
Records obtained by The San Francisco Standard showed that the skull belonged to a man found dead in an embankment beside a homeless encampment near Lake Merced in October 2014.
When the skull was discarded, it was encased in a clay cast as the staff attempted to reconstruct the appearance of the man’s face.
In the case that a body cannot be identified, or there are no next of kin left to claim it, the remains are cremated and scattered at the Golden Gate Bridge.
“The skull was a critical element in the [office’s] ability to identify [the remains]. Without the skull, further identification procedures could not be completed,” the lawsuit said.
After Kominek-Adachi flagged the disappearance, the head honcho allegedly “made no effort to initiate an investigation into the whereabouts of the skull and gave her the cold shoulder when she pressed further.
Serrano Sewell allegedly continued to dodge her inquiries and, when she was up for a promotion, he “illegally” directed her to take a polygraph test and subjected her to an extensive background check, the lawsuit alleged.
In that, the lawsuit purported Serrano Sewell was trying to retaliate against Kominek-Adachi by “uncover[ing] all aspects of her personal and private life.”
When Kominek-Adachi’s promotion was finally confirmed, the office pivoted and placed her in a temporary position, the lawsuit claimed.
Months later, and after Serrano Sewell insisted he’d recovered the long-lost skull, Kominek-Adachi fell out of her boss’ favor over a consumer affairs complaint she filed against a funeral home in Placer County, alleging that it failed to cremate her grandmother’s remains on a timely basis.
The complaint was made separately from her role at the medical examiner’s office, but the funeral home reached out to her workplace and asserted the filing was improper because of her role as a death investigator.
From there, Serrano Sewell allegedly used the debacle “to concoct a reason to terminate” Kominek-Adachi, the lawsuit claimed.
Serrano Sewell fired her while she was still being investigated by the office’s human resources department, according to the lawsuit.
She was first told her termination was due to budget cuts, but the city later linked it to her having “exerted undue influence” in her disagreement with the funeral home, the lawsuit said.
“She saw a career in the medical examiner’s office, and that career is over. Her termination is a terrible black mark on her ability to continue to work in her field,” her attorney, James Urbanic, told The Standard.
The San Francisco Board of Supervisors moved to settle Kominek-Adachi’s $750,000 wrongful termination lawsuit on Tuesday, KQED reported.
The Post reached out to the San Francisco City Attorney’s Office for comment.
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