SF Hospital Body in Stairwell Story Just Got More Horrifying

It was pretty shocking when the body of a patient who had been missing for two weeks at San Francisco General Hospital was found in a stairwell last week. Even more shocking: A worker at the hospital had reported seeing a woman passed out in the same place a week before the body of Lynne Spalding, 57, was finally discovered, sources tell the San Francisco Chronicle. According to the sources—"who have knowledge of the police investigation"—a hospital orderly told a nurse on October 1 that she had seen an apparently unconscious woman there, and the nurse then contacted the Sheriff's Department.

Sheriff's deputies provide security to the hospital, so they should have then been sent to check it out. But police still haven't ascertained how the department responded to the report—if at all, say the sources. The cause of Spalding's death is still not clear. "We the family, until we get an official report, there is nothing more we can do but wait. It's all horrifying," says a spokesperson for her family. "If this story could get any more horrifying, it just did." (More San Francisco stories.)