Harvey Hill Sumpter was 80 years old when he died on Friday, Feb. 19, 2010, in Manchester Square. According to the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner-Coroner, he died after sustaining blunt force trauma at 1533 W. 83rd St. His death was ruled a homicide, and it is listed as a Los Angeles Police Department 77th Street Division case.
He had been hurt more than four years earlier. Ed Winter, a spokesman for the coroner's office, told the Los Angeles Times that Sumpter was attacked in his home on Aug. 12, 2005, and suffered blunt force trauma to his head. A summary of the case published on the website Housecreep, which catalogs crimes by address, says the elderly man was "bound, gagged, assaulted, and robbed in his home" that day.
He never recovered. For four and a half years he lived with the damage from that attack, and the coroner's office at first deferred a ruling on his death while it studied whether complications from his injuries had killed him. In February 2011, coroner's officials ruled the death a homicide. He died, they said, "because of his head trauma and complications from being in a persistent vegetative state."
That finding matters. When a victim dies of injuries from an assault, even years later, the death can be treated as a killing, and anyone responsible for the original attack can face a murder charge. A robbery of a man in his mid-70s in his own home became, with his death, a homicide investigation.
The case was not entirely forgotten. A later post by the television station KTLA 5 noted that "the victim, Harvey Sumpter, was 80 years old when he died five years after" the 2005 attack, and that the attack left him with lasting injuries. Only a fragment of that post was saved for this story, and it is not clear what news prompted it, which suggests there may have been a later development in the case that could not be confirmed here.
Little else about his life could be found. No obituary or memorial page could be confirmed for him, and other men named Harvey Sumpter, including a retired postal worker in New Jersey who died in 2009, have no connection to him.
Manchester Square is a small residential neighborhood in South Los Angeles, named for Manchester Avenue, one of the area's main east-west streets. Its blocks are mostly lined with single-family homes.
Homicides in Los Angeles fell steeply in the late 2000s and early 2010s, yet many killings from those years were never solved.
No arrest, criminal charge or court case connected to the death of Harvey Hill Sumpter could be found in news archives or public records. More than 15 years later, there is no public sign that anyone has been held responsible. Neighbors on West 83rd Street in August 2005, and anyone who heard someone talk about robbing an older man in his home there, may hold information that could help detectives. Even a small detail, such as a name overheard, a vehicle seen nearby or a conversation remembered, can help detectives move a case forward. Anyone with information can call the Los Angeles Police Department at 877-527-3247 or leave an anonymous tip with Crime Stoppers at 800-222-TIPS.
