A man who was found dead in a smokestack at the Pearl Brewery had been missing for a week and disappeared within the first two hours of his first day of work, according to San Antonio police.
The man, a Mexican national whose name has not yet been released, was hired last week as a contract roofer at the old Boiler House, which is being redeveloped as the Boiler House Texas Grill & Wine Garden. According to an SAPD incident report, the project’s head roofer picked the man up for work Aug. 14 and the two arrived at the site around 8 a.m.
http://liarcatchers.com/missing_persons_investigations.html
The head roofer told police he then sent the man to take their tools into the Boiler House, a 115-year-old structure that formerly housed the brewery’s boilers, which is connected to the smokestack by a breaching duct, which looks like a covered walkway.
An hour-and-a-half later, the head roofer reportedly went to look for the man, but couldn’t find him anywhere. He figured the man had gone home, and the head roofer started asking his coworkers if anyone knew where he went. No one knew.
At 11:10 p.m. that same day, the man’s brother called police in an attempt to report his brother as a missing person, but SAPD’s criteria for an adult missing persons report calls for the person to be gone for 48 hours.
“That call was N-coded,” said an SAPD spokeswoman, explaining that there was no report made. “We did put a BOLO [Be On the Look Out] out citywide with his description, and the man said he’d call back the next day.”
The man’s brother told police he called an SAPD substation daily to see if anyone had found the man, and last Thursday, he tried to make a missing persons report but was allegedly told he’d have to wait five days. Relatives then made copies of the man’s Mexican ID card and left a flier at the construction site.
But it wasn’t until Tuesday that the man was found.
Several workers reported smelling a foul odor coming from a small door on the bottom of the smokestack around 1 p.m. Tuesday. One worker said he’d smelled something bad for several days, but on Tuesday, “it got really bad so he decided to go into the breaching duct to determine what was causing the smell,” the report states.
He looked down into the smokestack and saw a body at the bottom, which is about 20 feet from the duct.
Police believe the man’s death was an accident, but the Bexar County medical examiner’s office has not conducted an autopsy.
A spokesman for Lasco Enterprises, which owns the restaurant that’s set to open later this year, directed a reporter to SAPD and declined to answer any questions or name the contractor.
