Body found in McLaren Park is a man

A view of a row of homes that sit adjacent to McLaren Park. (Cindy Chew/The Examiner)

SAN FRANCISCO — The San Francisco Medical Examiner is expected to complete an autopsy today that will provide more clues about the death of a man whose body was found in a shallow grave in McLaren Park on Monday.

The body, earlier thought to be that of a woman, was found by a three-person Recreation and Park Department cleanup crew around 10:30 a.m. Monday morning in a small, wooded basin just north of Gleneagle Golf Course, said Rec and Park spokeswoman Lisa Seitz Gruwell.

The crew had noticed a homeless camp at the end of a narrow, paved maintenance road and had cleaned it up, and then saw a 10- to 15-foot fallen branch in the vicinity, she said. They decided to drag the branch out to be chipped, but upon moving the branch they saw a piece of a blue tarp covering a leg sticking out of the earth.

The age, race, time of death and cause of death have yet to be confirmed by authorities. A Medical Examiner’s representative said the autopsy, which should also reveal whether the death involved foul play, began on Tuesday and should be complete Wednesday.

While discovering a body on the job was a shock for the members of the work crew, Gruwell said, they are trained to handle such circumstances. The City’s parks make up about 20 percent of the land in San Francisco, and about 20 percent of The City’s homicides occur in them, she added. It’s not infrequent for victims to be discovered by or first reported to a park worker, she said.

It’s certainly not the first time in recent years that bodies have been found in McLaren Park. In September 2004, the body of 17-year-old Lincoln High School student Maxina Danner was found in a blood-soaked blanket on the side of the road in the park. Around the same time, the body of Daly City resident Steven Lent was dumped near the park’s tennis courts after he was stabbed to death.

The following June, a man who had been shot through the head was found in a burning car near the park’s Harvard Street entrance. In 2006, a 5-month-old girl was found inside a backpack in a heavily wooded area in the park.

Bay City News Service contributed to this report