Humberto Lozano Pichardo was 42 years old when he died on Friday, Jan. 22, 2010. According to the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner-Coroner, he died after sustaining blunt force trauma. His death was ruled a homicide, and it is listed as a Los Angeles Police Department Southwest Division case. The public record does not give the address where he was hurt.
His death was the end of a long decline. Craig Harvey, the chief coroner's investigator, told the Los Angeles Times that Pichardo suffered a blow to the head sometime in 2006 and had been living in and out of assisted-care facilities since then. Investigators did not know where the injury happened or what caused it. Harvey said the coroner's office was treating the case as a homicide "because of the nature of his injury," but that the finding could change as new information came in.
The final ruling, announced in February 2011, added a troubling detail. Coroner's officials said his death had been ruled a homicide, and that he "had infected ulcers and died as a result of neglect." The public record does not explain how the blow to the head and the neglect were connected, who was responsible for his care in his last years, or whether the neglect itself was ever investigated as a crime.
Those gaps are large. Nobody seems to have known, or at least nobody said publicly, how a man in his late 30s came to suffer a head injury severe enough to leave him dependent on others for the rest of his life. The record does not say whether he was attacked, robbed, beaten in a fight or hurt in some other way, whether anyone saw it, or when in 2006 it happened.
A memorial on Find a Grave records a few facts about his life. It says he was born on Nov. 24, 1967, and died on Jan. 22, 2010, and that he was buried at Inglewood Park Cemetery, one of the oldest and largest cemeteries in the Los Angeles area. No obituary or family fundraiser could be found. Other men named Humberto Pichardo, in New York, the Dominican Republic and Mexico, appear in search results but have no connection to him.
The LAPD's Southwest Division covers a broad stretch of South Los Angeles that includes the University of Southern California, Exposition Park, Leimert Park and the Crenshaw corridor. Because the record gives no address, it is not known which of those neighborhoods was tied to his case.
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 Humberto Lozano Pichardo 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. Anyone who knew him in 2006, who heard how he was hurt, or who saw how he was cared for in the years that followed 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.
