Missing woman pulled from storm drain dies at hospital

A San Diego woman who was the subject of a police search for the past two weeks and was found Monday in an underground storm drain system in medical distress has died after being rescued, according to a spokesman for the San Diego County medical examiner’s office.

Yafang Zhou, 59, was last seen on March 25 near her Union Street home in downtown San Diego.

On Tuesday, San Diego County Public Information Officer Chuck Westerheide told NBC 7 that Zhou died at Palomar Medical Center at about 4:15 p.m. on Monday, just hours after rescuers brought her back to the surface.

First-responders located missing woman on Monday

The search for Zhou led San Diego Police Department detectives on Monday to the 14600 block of Beeler Canyon Road in southern Poway, where they eventually heard a woman’s voice coming from underneath a manhole cover, Lt. Jonathan Dungan said.

Emergency crews rescued Zhou from the subterranean chamber, after which paramedics took her to a hospital in serious condition, Dungan said.

It was unclear how and why Zhou wound up stranded in the rural locale east of Miramar Reservoir.

“Out of respect for Yafang and her family, no additional details will be released at this time,” Dungan said Monday afternoon.

San Diego Fire Rescue and Poway Fire first responders located and extracted Zhou Monday afternoon near the border of those two cities.

“What she was doing in there, what drove her in there, how she came to be in there — we are unclear,” San Diego Fire-Rescue battalion chief Erik Windsor said after the extraction. “It is very unusual to have someone in there.”

It is very possible that Zhou had been there for days, Windsor said.

Later on Monday, at about 4:30, San Diego police confirmed the victim’s identity. Zhou was first reported missing to police on April 3. Flyers that had been posted said she was last seen March 25 near Union Street in downtown San Diego, which is where Zhou and her husband lived together, her mother-in-law told NBC 7 on Monday.

The situation began Monday morning when San Diego detectives were in the area as part of their search for Zhou. While they were here, they heard a woman’s voice coming from the storm drain, at which time they called firefighters.

Firefighters set up a unified command center late in the morning in the 14700 block of Beeler Canyon Road, with eight fire-rescue vehicles and a couple patrol cars on the scene as well as a tripod with a rope belayed beneath it into an open manhole.

When SD Fire-Rescue arrived, they determined they needed to access the storm drain system to try to locate the victim, and then San Diego urban search & rescue team members and Poway fire crews entered the storm system. The initial search proved fruitless, however.

“Firefighters were literally inside the .. storm drain, crawling on their stomachs to try to locate the victim,” Windsor said, adding later that “when we go in a confined space, we’re worried about all sorts of gases, limited oxygen, what’s going on in the confined space that are environmentally dangerous to them. There are also animals in those confined spaces.”

Rescuers were in the process of calling in a bomb squad with robots to aid in the search, Windsor said, while firefighters were opening manhole covers along the storm drain’s path and ultimately locate Zhou in an area uphill from where they had been searching.

Rescuers then set up another tripod over the second manhole not far away, and an ambulance stood by at the ready with medics preparing a stretcher.

After using a system of ropes and pulleys, first-responders were able to pull Zhou and her rescuer to the surface at about 2:20 p.m. Windsor said at the time that Zhou was taken to the hospital and underwent “lifesaving measures,” which sadly failed.

“It is very amazing that we were able to extricate her and get her going to the hospital,” Windsor said.

The rescue took place in a fairly isolated stretch of road between a large residential complex and an industrial park off of Scripps Poway Parkway.