Police Now Believe Teenager Killed Himself by Jumping Off Building

WOODLAND HILLS —  A teenage boy, first thought to have been beaten to death when his body was found Sunday, probably committed suicide by leaping more than 40 feet from the top of a condo building, police said Tuesday.

After a preliminary examination by a medical examiner in the Los Angeles County coroner’s office, officers investigating the death of 14-year-old Seiichi Yamamura said all indications now suggest that the boy killed himself by plunging from one of the three-story buildings at the complex where his family lived.

“Right now we are leaning very heavily toward suicide,” said Rick Swanston, head of homicide investigators at the West Valley Division.

Swanston said a medical examination of the boy’s body revealed much more extensive injuries than officers initially suspected, indicating that Seiichi’s multiple fractures came from a hard fall and not from someone hitting him with a weapon.

Coroner’s spokesman Craig Harvey said an autopsy must still be performed to determine the official cause of death.

Seiichi’s badly bruised body was discovered by two tenants in the ViewPointe apartments, a gated complex in the 20500 block of Ventura Boulevard, about 4 a.m. Sunday.

The boy apparently had left the family apartment in the complex two hours earlier, while his parents and 15-year-old sister slept. After realizing he was gone, they went looking for him and encountered police officers who had just been called to the building to investigate the death.

Though he would not go into detail, Swanston said that after investigating the case further, officers found that the boy, who recently had moved from Colorado, was experiencing “personal and emotional” problems that may have contributed to his death.

Swanston said the possibility of Seiichi being pushed from the building was ruled out almost immediately.

“There’s pretty much no way an individual could have gotten to where he was on the roof by force,” Swanston said. “It was becoming obvious to us that for foul play to have happened, it would have had to been someone who lived in the building. And with such tight security, video cameras and the fact that you have to sign in, we just don’t think that was what happened.”

Police believe the boy walked about a quarter-mile from his family’s apartment on the east side of the complex to a building on the west side, climbed a ladder to the roof and jumped. “We initially thought it was hard to get to the roof, but now see that it’s relatively easy,” Swanston said.

In addition, police said that if there had been a struggle or beating that night, one of the more than 1,000 ViewPointe residents would have been awakened.

“It was a warm night and a lot of people likely had their windows open,” he said. “Somebody would have heard something.”

Swanston said police don’t believe Seiichi was unhappy over anything that happened on Saturday night. “We don’t think there was a specific incident that led to this,” he said.