An unhoused woman living out of her van in San Diego was towed away by authorities, who did not realize she was inside the car until she was discovered dead in the vehicle a month later, according to a legal claim and autopsy records made public this week.
Monica Cameroni De Adams, 65, was inside her parked Honda minivan at about 1am on 5 November 2023 when a driver crashed into her vehicle and another parked car, lawyers for her children outlined in a wrongful death claim against the southern California city.
The driver was later arrested for driving under the influence, and Cameroni De Adams’s vehicle was damaged, with its rear door crushed and windows broken, according to an autopsy report.
San Diego police officers responding to the collision called for a private tow truck company to impound the van, police records show. In a report filed that day, an officer said attempts to identify the owners of the damaged cars were unsuccessful and he had them towed “as they were filled with property, and I wanted to avoid further vandalism or thefts”.
On 6 December, a month later, a yard worker at the tow lot noticed a “pungent smell” in the van and alerted authorities. Police and fire department officials found Cameroni De Adams “wedged under miscellaneous items in the vehicle’s middle row”, the medical examiner’s office said in its autopsy. Her body was decomposed, and authorities said her cause of death was multiple blunt force injuries.
The family’s claim asserts that she had “sustained severe but survivable blunt force injuries from the collision that required medical attention”, and that police left her “trapped inside of her vehicle without necessary care” and she could have been saved if officers had hospitalized her.
“For my clients to have to live with the knowledge that their mom was towed away alive from the scene of a wreck only to die in a tow yard alone is incredibly difficult,” said John C Carpenter, the family’s attorney. “It would not have been difficult to see if there was somebody inside. It’s just basic common decency that you would check to see what’s inside a vehicle before you tow it away … They buried her alive in her car.”
The case shines a harsh light on the dangers facing unhoused people sleeping in rough conditions in California, which in recent years has been home to roughly half of all unsheltered people in the US living on the streets. More than 6,000 people in the San Diego region were counted living in tents and vehicles and other makeshift structures last year.
The news of Cameroni De Adams’s death comes the same week as a report in Vallejo, a Bay Area city, revealed how James Edward Oakley, a 58-year-old unhoused man, was crushed to death during a municipal trash cleanup last year.
The claim filed by Cameroni De Adams’s children, the first step in litigation, calls for $50m in damages and accuses the city and its police officers of wrongful death, negligence, infliction of emotional distress and “tortious interference with human remains”.
Cameroni De Adams’s family had sent her birthday wishes on 13 November, a week after the crash, and became alarmed when she didn’t respond and they couldn’t find her van, prompting them to file a missing person’s report the next day, according to the claim and autopsy report. Roughly a week later, authorities told the family her car had been located, but she was still missing, Carpenter said.
The autopsy said the woman had been living in her van in the San Diego area for seven years, and Carpenter said he was not able to share more details about her life.
“She was loved. She was an important part of their family. She mattered,” said the lawyer, adding that it seemed the officers at the collision scene assumed the vehicle belonged to an unhoused person and treated the car and its owner as “worthless”: “I can’t imagine a situation where an officer doesn’t look for a person inside a vehicle that’s involved in a wreck. The only thing I can think of is that our unhealthy prejudices against unhoused people made the police officer just not care about this vehicle as much as he should have. That’s a sad and dangerous thing.”
Spokespeople for the police department and city attorney’s office declined to comment on pending litigation.
Nearly 500 unsheltered people died in San Diego county last year, according to the San Diego Union-Tribune, including from overdoses, the most common cause, as well as from hypothermia and impacts from floods. Thirty unhoused people died when they were struck by vehicles and seven were killed by trains, the paper found.
Older and elderly adults increasingly forced to live on the streets in California are particularly vulnerable to health problems and violence. In May 2023, Annette Pershal, a 68-year-old unhoused San Diego woman was killed when a teenager shot her with a pellet gun at her camping spot. She was known to locals as “Granny Annie”, her daughter telling the Guardian: “She was a person, not just a thing to be used for target practice. Her life mattered.”
