A government office that exists to protect evidence can’t afford even one “missing skull” moment—because one mistake can crack every case that touches it.
Story Snapshot
- A former San Francisco death investigator alleges the head of the medical examiner’s office disposed of a human skull while preparing for an inspection.
- The same lawsuit claims retaliation and termination followed after she discovered or reported what happened.
- The accused official also sits on a working group tied to California’s multibillion-dollar stem cell agency, widening the oversight questions.
- The public record discussed so far relies heavily on a lawsuit filing and one main chain of reporting, leaving many facts still untested in court.
A Skull as Evidence Is Not a Metaphor, It’s a Chain-of-Custody Problem
Sonia Kominek-Adachi, a former death investigator in San Francisco’s medical examiner system, alleges in a lawsuit that David Serrano Sewell, the office’s current leader, disposed of a human skull. The allegation matters for a simple reason: remains are often evidence, not “property,” and the chain of custody is the entire ballgame. When an item disappears, every related decision becomes vulnerable to doubt, appeals, and public suspicion.
The lawsuit’s timing detail sharpens the stakes: the skull allegedly got discarded while the office prepared for an inspection. Inspections exist for a reason—public offices handling deaths must meet strict standards, keep careful inventories, and document how evidence moves. If a leader makes evidence vanish to make a room look cleaner or a problem go away, that is not a management style. It is a governance failure with courtroom consequences.
The Retaliation Claim Turns a Workplace Dispute Into a Public-Trust Case
The second half of the story may be the more familiar American drama: an employee says she raised a concern, and the boss punished her for it. Kominek-Adachi’s lawsuit alleges retaliation after she discovered or reported the skull disposal, culminating in her termination. Retaliation claims are hard to prove, but easy to understand. If workers learn that speaking up ends careers, problems go underground, and the public only hears about them after damage spreads.
Common sense says whistleblowing protections exist because bureaucracies do not self-correct on good intentions alone. Conservatives value accountable institutions, not unaccountable fiefdoms. A medical examiner’s office is not a tech startup where mistakes can be patched with an update; it sits at the intersection of families’ grief, criminal justice, and state power. If the lawsuit’s allegations hold water, San Francisco taxpayers were funding a system that punished the messenger instead of fixing the message.
Why the Inspection Detail Should Keep You Reading
The lawsuit’s reference to an inspection creates an uncomfortable open question: what condition was the office in that would make anyone think a skull needed to “go away”? The public does not yet have a full accounting from court-tested evidence, but inspections typically focus on compliance, documentation, and facility readiness. Leaders who fear what an inspector will find sometimes cut corners. Cutting corners with human remains is different—it risks contaminating not just a scene, but the integrity of the office itself.
Limited data available; key insights summarized from the currently cited reporting and the lawsuit description. The known public details do not yet include a full explanation from Sewell, a detailed court response, or a timeline tested through discovery. That gap matters. When information comes mainly from a complaint, readers should treat it as an allegation until proven. At the same time, the underlying issues—evidence handling and retaliation—are serious enough to demand real answers, not PR fog.
The CIRM Connection Raises Oversight Questions Beyond City Hall
The case also gets more politically delicate because Sewell reportedly serves on a working group connected to California’s stem cell agency, the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM), tied to enormous public funding. That doesn’t prove wrongdoing; it raises a governance question: should state-level bodies have clearer standards for members facing credible allegations that implicate integrity and recordkeeping? Voters do not fund science agencies to become safe harbors for controversy elsewhere.
Oversight works best when it is boring, consistent, and fast. A conservative lens favors bright lines: evidence must be tracked, audits must mean something, and leadership roles require higher standards, not lower ones. If a public official holds multiple trust-based positions, each role borrows credibility from the other. That makes the system efficient—until one role becomes a liability that drags down public confidence across institutions that should stay separate.
What Accountability Should Look Like Before the Court Decides Anything
San Francisco can’t litigate its way out of the trust deficit; it must manage it. The public interest is straightforward: preserve evidence, document every transfer, and enforce clear anti-retaliation rules that protect good-faith reporting. If the office already has those policies, leadership must prove they work in practice. If it doesn’t, the city has a management problem that no verdict can fully repair, because skepticism will linger long after headlines fade.
The most sobering takeaway isn’t the sensational object at the center of the lawsuit. It’s the possibility that a basic safeguard—“we don’t throw away evidence”—can fail inside a taxpayer-funded office built to do exactly the opposite. A court will sort out what happened and who is credible. Until then, the only prudent posture for any serious city is to tighten controls, protect internal reporting, and treat public trust like evidence: once lost, hard to recover.
Sources:
San Francisco Lawsuit Charges: A Missing Skull, Alleged Retaliation and CIRM Working Group Member
