Let's just get this out of the way first: it probably had nothing to do with the touring production of the musical White Christmas at the Segerstrom Center for the Arts, nor Hal Landon Jr.'s 32nd annual turn as Scrooge in A Christmas Carol at South Coast Repertory across the walk. But something prompted 68-year-old Richard French of Costa Mesa to drive to the top of the six-story parking structure that serves both Costa Mesa arts venues, get out of his car and fall or leap to his death.
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This went down around 11:20 a.m. Thursday near Town Center and Park Center drives.
South Coast security guards notified Costa Mesa cops about the body of a man found in the bushes near the Park Center Parking Structure. Paramedics quickly arrived to pull the man out and perform CPR, to no avail.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.