Sheriff's Investigators recently compiled the sketch above of a man whose body was found floating off the Newport Beach coastline on Tuesday, Dec. 24, 2013–anchored in place with a weight and the fellow having apparently suffered a blow to the head.
It's as if Elmore Leonard's pen put the fellow there.
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The body was found floating about a mile off of the Newport Beach coastline in the Crystal Cove area, according to Lt. Jeff Hallock, the Orange County sheriff's spokesman.
The victim may have suffered unknown head trauma and had been weighted down with a 35-pound dumbbell, said Hallock, noting that investigators believe the man had been dead for several weeks prior to the discovery.
He was wearing dark colored Champion nylon sweatpants with zippered legs, size 11 black Asics tennis shoes like this …
… and a black Timex watch with a black plastic band like this:
While his age is unknown, the unknown man is believed to be older than 30 and as old as 50. He was 5-foot-8 to 5-foot-9, about 165 pounds with dark hair.
Anyone with additional information is asked to call the Orange County Sheriff's Department at 714.647.7000 or 714.647.7044. Anonymous tips may be left with Orange County Crime Stoppers at 855.847.6227 (855-TIP-OCCS), via occrimestoppers.org or by texting to 274637 (C-R-I-M-E-S) from a cell phone. (All text messages should begin with the letters “OCCS”.)
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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.