Harmon's mom, who lives in Lynnwood, contacted the police on January 9 to file an "attempt to locate" report in Kitsap County. For the next six weeks, Harmon's friends and family placed newspaper ads soliciting information about his whereabouts, papered Capitol Hill with flyers, and filed missing person reports. Harmon was HIV-positive, and left his medication at home. They were worried for his safety and his health.
But during most of their search, his friends and family didn't realize that officials had a body matching Harmon's description, found in a South Seattle park nine days after Harmon disappeared. The body was in the King County Medical Examiner's Office for a month before officials figured out it was Harmon.
On January 15, an employee at Kubota Japanese Gardens in Rainier Beach was showing the grounds to a woman scouting sites for her wedding. They stumbled upon Harmon's body, lying in a stand of bamboo, and contacted police. His friends and family have no idea how he got there, or what took police so long to match the body with the missing person reports.
The body--clean shaven, and dressed in an unzipped warm-up jacket and unsnapped warm-up pants, with one shoe off--was taken to the Medical Examiner's Office for an autopsy. The official cause of death was recorded as hypothermia, and investigators determined that he had died less than 24 hours before the body was discovered.
But officials didn't know who it was; Detective R. C. Norton of the Seattle Police Department Homicide Unit was assigned to the case, though it didn't appear to be murder. It took officials another month to figure out it was Harmon.
While officials had a mystery body, Harmon's friends were actively searching for him. On January 22--while Harmon's body was lying in the morgue--Harmon's friend Tom Root went to the Seattle Police Department East Precinct to file a missing person report. The cops there told him one was already on file.
"They basically laughed me out of there," Root says. So he placed ads in The Stranger and Seattle Gay News on February 14. Four days later, Root came home to a message from the medical examiner--they saw the ad, and were almost certain Harmon's body was in their custody. A check of Harmon's dental records confirmed it.
Harmon's friends are confused: Why did it take to long to identify him when there were several official police reports about his missing status?
"They really dropped the ball," Root says. Moreover, since Harmon's death isn't classified as a murder, his friends and family think the police don't really care how Harmon got to Kubota Gardens, or where he had spent the nine days leading up to his death. However, Detective Norton is still assigned to the case, and is trying to figure out what happened.
The Medical Examiner's Office doesn't keep stats on how long identity is unknown, a spokesperson says, so it's hard to determine if a situation like Harmon's (he was unidentified for a month) is common.
