Both people found dead in a home on Pleasantdale Street in Santa Clarita in May died of natural causes, coroner’s officials told The Signal Wednesday.
Deputies with the Santa Clarita Valley Sheriff’s Station who were dispatched to the 19000 block of Pleasantdale Street in Canyon Country for a welfare check on May 5 discovered the badly decomposed bodies of a man and a woman.
An informant had called to say the residents of the home had not been seen for several weeks and there was a strong odor coming from the home.
In July, officials with the Los Angeles County Coroner’s Department identified the man as 68-year-old Terry William Cooper.
On Wednesday, Coroner spokesman Ed Winter identified the woman as a 66-year-old Caucasian female with no next of kin.
The woman’s identity is known to the coroner but continued efforts to find any of her relatives is a job now turned over to the Los Angeles County Public Administrator, Winter said Wednesday.
The manner in which the couple died is by natural causes, he said.
The cause of death for both is atherosclerotic cardio-vascular disease which happens when a buildup of plaque inside the arteries interferes with the delivery of oxygen-rich blood to the heart.
“The woman was found dead and badly decomposed in her bedroom chair,” a coroner’s spokeswoman said Wednesday. “The male (Cooper) was found dead on the living room floor.”
The woman’s death was complicated by diabetes, he said.
Lt. John Corina of the Los Angeles County Sheriff Department’s Homicide Bureau said in May that it appeared both people died of natural causes and that the exact cause of death would not be known until after an autopsy.
“It looks like possibly one passed away quite a while ago, and the other passed away more recently,” Corina said in May.
Although both were pronounced death on May 5, coroner officials did not have a date for when they actually died.
The woman’s body was cremated on Aug. 28.
County staff with the Public Administrator’s office are pursuing a faint lead on a possible relative of the woman – a cousin.
“They are working to see it they can locate that person,” Winter said.
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