The Crosby Hotel at 516 O'Farrell Street may be a case study in poorly managed, essentially neglected Tenderloin SROs. Not only was a 48-year-old man found dead in his room last week of blunt-force trauma, but there was a dead woman found in her room almost two months after she died, back in April.
As the Examiner reports, 56-year-old Julie Mann died in her room on February 17, and despite building management (which is overseen by Episcopal Community Services) conducting two welfare checks on Mann who had apparently gone missing and whose dog was reportedly "completely freaking out" inside her room and despite the horrid stench of her rotting corpse permeating an entire section of the building, no one located her body until April 17, 57 days later.
Management says, "This is one of those things we didn’t do right," but the entire story is fairly baffling. The body was apparently found "underneath debris, clothing and newspapers," but how could no one have suspected what that smell was?! A neighbor said he stopped using the elevator on that side of the building because of the stench.
And despite the obvious odor, and and freaking-out dog, building management just "sealed" the room (after freeing the dog) and filed a missing persons report on March 9 for Mann, who had multiple friends in the building and was usually seen by neighbors on a daily basis.
It wasn't until building employees went back into her unit to clean and reclaim it in April that the body was discovered.
Kind of makes you think that all your assumptions about the insides of most of those Tenderloin SROs are true!
The second death at the Crosby Hotel, 48-year-old Sheldon Smith's, is being investigated as a suspicious death after his body was discovered only 24 hours after he died last week. In contrast to Mann, Smith kept to himself and neighbors said they barely ever saw him.
