Follow my Instagram https://www.instagram.com/scottontape
If you would like to help me finance my travels and films, you can PayPal me at https://www.paypal.me/scottontape99
Join my Facebook group Scottontape
#famousgraves #truecrime #elisalam #cecilhotel
Filaments' by Scott Buckley is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license (CC BY 3.0)
https://www.youtube.com/c/ScottBuckley
Music promoted by BreakingCopyright: https://bit.ly/filaments-song
In 2013, Elisa Lam, a 21-year-old tourist from Vancouver, British Columbia, disappeared while staying at the Cecil Hotel, a Los Angeles hotel with a long and sinister history. She was last seen on January 31, 2013. As part of the police investigation, a video was released showing Lam behaving erratically in a hotel elevator. This footage became a viral sensation. On February 19, 2013, Lam's body was found in a water tank on the hotel's roof. His death was later determined to be an accidental drowning, although the exact circumstances leading up to it remain unclear. Lam is the subject of a 2021 documentary, Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel.
On January 26, 2013, Lam checked into the Cecil Hotel, also known as Stay on Main, located in downtown Los Angeles near Skid Row. Early in her stay, she was moved from a shared room to a private room due to "strange behavior." Lam was last seen at the hotel on January 31. Her parents, David and Yinna Lam, who were in daily contact with their daughter, quickly reported her missing. Lam's belongings, including a wallet, ID and laptop, had been left in his room. A Los Angeles police bulletin on Lam's disappearance noted that she spoke English and Cantonese, used public transportation, may have been suffering from mild depression, and was ultimately headed to Santa Cruz, California. .
Police appealed for help from the public and released a video showing Lam, dressed in a red hoodie, in a hotel elevator. In the sequence, she presses numerous buttons, looks out of the elevator, returns to a corner, exits the elevator and waves her hands. The video went viral and sparked widespread interest and speculation about the case. A theory emerged that Lam was playing what is sometimes called the Korean elevator game, in which pressing elevator buttons in a specific pattern is said to open a portal to another dimension.
While Lam was still missing, hotel guests began complaining about low water pressure. On February 19, 2013, a maintenance worker looked into one of four 4-by-8-foot water tanks on the hotel's roof and spotted a dead body that turned out to be Lam's. The worker later said in court documents: "I noticed the hatch to the main water tank was open and I looked inside and saw an Asian woman lying face up in water about twelve inches from the top of the tank./" The roof had already been searched, with the help of a police dog. However, no one had checked the inside of the water tanks.
The investigation into Lam's death continued after his body was found. Access to the roof was supposed to be reserved for hotel employees. An internal staircase leading to the roof had a locked door fitted with an alarm – supposedly working – which should have alerted staff if it had been opened. Three emergency exits also provided access to the roof.
After further investigation, an autopsy and toxicology tests, the coroner ruled that Lam had accidentally drowned. There was no indication of physical trauma to his body and no drugs that may have contributed to his death were found in his system. The coroner's report cited Lam's bipolar disorder as a significant condition that played a role in his death.
Due to a negligence lawsuit against the hotel filed by Lam's parents (the lawsuit was dismissed in 2015), the lead investigator in the case filed a deposition. /"My opinion is that she lost her medication and in her condition she ended up on the roof and got into the water tank," Detective Wallace Tennelle said. In his statement, the detective also noted, "My partner and I were trying to figure out how someone could have put her in there, and it's hard for someone to have been able to do that without leaving a fingerprints, without leaving any DNA or anything. like that. So she went up alone./"
Elisa Lam is buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Burnaby, Canada.
The Cecil Hotel – which had renamed itself Stay on Main before Lam's stay – has a grisly history that may have contributed to speculation about Lam's death. The hotel has been the scene of multiple murders and suicides, dating back almost as far as its first days of operation in 1927. In the 1980s, serial killer Richard Ramirez, known as the Night Stalker, stayed at the hotel. Jack Unterweger, an Austrian serial killer, was a guest in 1991.
Please take the opportunity to connect and share this video with your friends and family if you find it useful.
