A 45-year-old man drowned Wednesday in a man-made lake at SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles, California.
The unidentified man trespassed onto stadium property, waded into the lake, and swam out to the center point before he went under the water around 6 a.m., according to Deadline. Surveillance video reportedly showed that the man never resurfaced from the roughly 15-foot depth of water, the outlet continued.
Security guards spotted the man and called law enforcement and the fire department, but the rescue rapidly descended into a body recovery, the New York Post reported. It took about three hours for divers from the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department Special Enforcement Bureau to recover the man’s body. The divers had to employ sonar to find him in the water, according to a post shared on Twitter.
#LASD SEB divers on scene assisting @Inglewood_PD with sonar and dive operations in search of a body in the lake at SOFI Stadium. pic.twitter.com/NmfHpHwzFs
— SEB (@SEBLASD) July 6, 2022
SoFi Stadium is home to the Los Angeles Rams and the Los Angeles Chargers, and earlier this year the stadium hosted the Superbowl, Deadline noted. (RELATED: Fan Apparently Assaulted Outside Super Bowl Stadium, Now In Coma)
“We don’t know why he was on the property and we do not have him identified,” Inglewood Mayor James Butts said Wednesday, according to Deadline. “They have plenty of surveillance video … We don’t know why he got in the water.”
There was nothing SoFi Stadium could have done to prevent the man’s death, Butts noted. “Honestly, this is someone who made a conscious decision to trespass on the property, get into the lake, and he ended up having some distress and difficulty,” he stated, according to Deadline.