Update: Body Discovered on Ocean Campus Has Been Identified

By Kyra Young and John Adkins

kyrajyoung@gmail.com; jradproduction@gmail.com

 

Warning: The following article contains mention of death, decay and anatomical detail. 

 

San Francisco’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner (OCME) has identified the body that was found on City College’s Ocean Campus back in July as Kevin Fobbs. He was 31 years old.

On Wednesday, July 31, 2024, Jorge Trigueros Hernandez, a groundskeeper at City College, was conducting a search for the source of a foul smell that had taken over the area of Cloud Circle in front of Batmale Hall. The smell had become increasingly unbearable throughout the week. 

“Ever smell a dead rat stuck in the wall?” Dan Kelly, a supervisor for the buildings and grounds department, asked. “It smelled like that, times ten.”  

“Jorge was on the scene first, then myself,” Kelly said, reflecting on the day. “We found the body that morning around ten, called the police, who then called the coroner and they pronounced him dead on the scene. They figured, based on the state of the body, that he’d been there for at least a week.”

Fobbs’s body was found on the ground beneath the bushes alongside a walking path behind Cloud Hall loading dock. He was wearing only black socks and a pair of orange pants. Emergency services were called and the fire department pronounced Fobbs dead on the scene – a jurisdiction the OCME accepted due to a decomposed decedent in public view. 

“They asked us to clear away some brush to make it easier for them to extract the body. Then they rolled it onto a gurney and took it away probably by 1 p.m.,” Kelly said. 

According to Veronica M. Vargo, an investigator with the OCME, Fobbs had no evidence or personal property found at the scene aside from a blue lighter with miscellaneous white powder in plastic attached at the end. Fobbs, originally listed as John Doe #159, was identified by fingerprint comparison after being taken into the OCME, which was further confirmed by the San Francisco Police Department Identification Bureau. He was born on March 20, 1993, with no current fixed address. The OCME commenced a search for the legal next-of-kin to notify them of the death.

Fobbs’s body was found severely decomposed, with partial skeletonization of the torso and upper extremities – defined as when more than half of a dead organism’s skeletal elements are exposed, but with soft tissue still attached. The body also had a severe insect infestation and lacked a number of organs in the torso as well as the aorta and eyes.

According to forensic entomology, blowflies are typically the first insects to arrive and lay eggs on a dead body, and the stage of growth their larvae are in is a determining factor of how long the body has been left undiscovered. The description of the flies that were on Fobb’s body matched the description of the blowfly and the eggs had already hatched and were in their larval stage of development as signified by the maggots visible in the body.

On Wednesday at 3:16 pm, just a couple hours after the body was retrieved from the site, Chancellor Mitch Bailey sent out an email notifying City College faculty of the body. However, the City College Police Department did not send out any “Timely Warning” or “Emergency Notification” to the campus community.
Students who heard about the body second-hand expressed concerns to the Guardsman that the campus community was not properly notified.
Chief of City College Police Department Mario Vasquez, who confirmed that he was responsible for issuing incident reports, was questioned as to why he did not issue an incident report to the campus community about the body. He quickly asserted that it “was not required.”

When contacted a second time to clarify why he deemed that an incident report was not required, he stated that it was not a Clery Crime and there were no students on campus at the time.
“I wanna make sure the campus community is safe first and foremost, I have no issue sending out timely incident reports, I knew there wasn’t any threat to the campus community. The SFPD arrived and took care of it and once the body was removed that was it,” Mario Vasquez said.
No evidence has been found that suggests Kevin Fobbs was a former City College student.