An L.A. County Sheriff’s Department Homicide Bureau official said the investigation into a body found in a mall parking lot Wednesday is being treated as a suicide.
The decedent, whose identification was released Thursday, was Jeffrey Koons, a 47-year-old man who was identified as an “unhoused individual,” according to the county Medical Examiner’s Office.
An autopsy had not yet been made for the official confirmation as of Thursday morning, according to Lt. Michael Modica of the Homicide Bureau. He said the initial determination was made by the detectives and the medical examiners who first arrived on the scene.
The apparent cause of death was a gunshot wound, and Santa Clarita Valley Sheriff’s Station deputies who first responded to the scene indicated they found a gun and a shattered window next to Koons’ body.
Detectives believe Koons was living in the car he was found in at the time of the shooting, which was an older model car parked among a long line of Mercedes Benz sedans in the Valencia Town Center parking lot, south of Magic Mountain Parkway.
The parking area was being used as an overflow lot for the dealerships on nearby Auto Row, and a Mercedes Benz employee saw an older-model car that was not a Mercedes parked alongside the dealership’s sedans, according to a Homicide Bureau official.
When station deputies went to investigate the “suspicious vehicle” call, they found a body, contacted the Homicide Bureau and cordoned off a section of the lot.
For information about free and low-cost local mental health resources, visit bethedifferenceSCV.org.
