San Francisco to Pay $750K in Lawsuit Alleging Top Official Threw Away Human Skull

The San Francisco Board of Supervisors will soon approve a $750,000 settlement in a wrongful-termination suit alleging that a top medical examiner’s official threw away a skull needed to identify a body.

According to the lawsuit filed in 2024, former Office of the Chief Medical Examiner employee Sonia Kominek-Adachi alleged that she faced retaliation from David Serrano Sewell, the OCME’s executive director, after reporting that he had tossed an unidentified human skull in the trash while cleaning out the medical examiner’s office.

A former death investigator in the office, Kominek-Adachi, said she discovered that the skull was missing in January 2023 while taking inventory of body parts in OCME’s custody. She said she then emailed Serrano Sewell about his involvement and reported it to her supervisors, which she alleged led to retaliation, harassment and her eventual firing.

Kominek-Adachi’s lawsuit also accuses Serrano Sewell of showing a prior pattern of abusing his authority. According to the suit, he routinely treated Kominek-Adachi inappropriately because of her gender, used racial slurs and made derogatory comments about women in the office — telling her: “They need to know their place,” and “They need to keep quiet,” court records state. In one instance, Kominek-Adachi alleged that when she introduced Serrano Sewell to her boyfriend, he told her, “It’s good to marry up.”

The suit also alleges that Serrano Sewell interfered in a high-profile public investigation by directing staff to change the cause of death for a San Francisco supervisor’s stepson, who died of suicide. And in a separate incident, OCME employees deposed in the lawsuit also stated concerns that Serrano Sewell had allegedly altered information on documents related to the OCME’s National Association of Medical Examiners accreditation.

“Sonia wasn’t just fighting for herself in this case,” James Urbanic, her attorney, told KQED. “Yes, it was about her termination and what she went through, but she was also fighting against the city, using bureaucracy against its employees. Once she began shining her light into the dark corners of City Hall, she didn’t let up, and I think the city’s better off for it.”

The OCME and Serrano Sewell did not respond to requests for comment.

The missing skull eventually set the events in motion for Kominek-Adachi’s firing, the suit argues. The U.S. Department of Justice had ordered the OCME to improve its records of missing and unidentified persons, a task assigned to Kominek-Adachi. According to the suit, San Francisco had fallen behind on identifying unclaimed human remains.

From 2020-2023, San Francisco has reported 1,487 unidentified or unclaimed individuals, city data shows. If the bodies can’t be identified or no next of kin is found, the city cremates the deceased and scatters their ashes at the Golden Gate.

The OCME’s website said that in the overwhelming majority of death cases, it identifies the subject within 24 hours.

In depositions, staff alleged that the skull had been last seen in reconstruction clay, which made it look like a mannequin head. Kominek-Adachi argued that Serrano Sewell, who thought that the skull was a prop, threw it away during the viewing room cleaning, which was needed for inspection.

“It was total incompetence,” Kominek-Adachi told KQED. “He has an office job and had no business handling remains.”

In 2024, records obtained by the San Francisco Standard connected the head to an unidentified man found dead near an encampment in the city’s Lake Merced neighborhood. Depositions with other OCME employees show that attempts weren’t made to locate the skull until “it was on the news.”

“The skull was a critical element in the OCME’s ability to identify Doe #82’s remains,” the suit alleges. However, it said Serrano Sewell “made no effort to initiate an investigation into the whereabouts of the skull,” nor did he respond to Kominek-Adachi’s emails about it.

Instead, he allegedly tried to stop her from getting a promotion by illegally directing her to take a polygraph test that other candidates for the position were not required to take. When she was ultimately promoted, she was given a temporary position, a loophole that allowed her to be fired at will, the suit states.

Then, Kominek-Adachi and Serrano Sewell became embroiled in a state consumer affairs case against a funeral home in Placer County, which refused to cremate Kominek-Adachi’s grandmother, the suit states. Although she said her complaint was a personal matter, the funeral home contacted the OCME, which Serrano Sewell allegedly seized upon as an opportunity to terminate her.

Court records show that Serrano Sewell said he found the skull in February 2024, after multiple other employees “diligently searched for it and couldn’t find it,” Urbanic said.

“It was only after Ms. Kominek was fired that they found the skull, and that’s its own story,” he said.

The ordinance to approve the settlement will be introduced on Tuesday and then assigned to the Government Audit and Oversight Committee, before the Board of Supervisors finalizes the settlement over the next few weeks.

KQED’s Alex Hall contributed to this report.