Cause of death of man who died in Lakewood jail is deferred

The coroner’s office said it will have to await toxicological tests to determine what caused the death of a 57-year-old man in his cell at the sheriff’s Lakewood Station hours after he was arrested in Bellflower on suspicion of drunken driving.

An autopsy conducted on Robert Wayne Olsen was inconclusive on the cause of his death, said coroner’s Assistant Chief Ed Winter. The results of toxicological tests can take at least six weeks to obtain.

Complaints about backlogged testing and unprocessed bodies have recently dogged the coroner’s office and partly lead to the resignation of Los Angeles County Medical Examiner-Coroner Mark Fajardo, who will be retuing to his old job of coroner in Riverside County.

Olsen, a Lakewood resident, was found unresponsive by a jailer about 6:30 a.m. last Thursday in his single-man cell at the facility in the 5100 block of North Clark Avenue, where he was held since the previous afteoon, according to the sheriff’s department.

Deputies immediately began administering CPR until Los Angeles County Fire Department persoel arrived. The inmate did not respond to life-saving measures and was pronounced dead at 6:48 a.m. Thursday.

His body bore “no obvious signs of physical trauma,” according to a sheriff’s department statement.

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