Strange sort of suicide for The Walking Man.

I only bothered to read about the Walking Man because he was called The Silver Lake Walking Man.

Then I saw a small memorial for him on the Silver Lake reservoir path when I ran last night. I hate memorials – they don’t have them back east. It’s like there’s no real land here, or people don’t understand what a cemetery is. The flowers die in a day in the blazing sun, so you have dead flowers in worthless vases, or a dirty teddy bear. Ugly, smelly, and no, it’s not the thought that counts when it’s such a thoughtless thing to do.

Anyway, turns out he walked all over town locally, said his obit.

Abrams traversed 20 to 30 miles of pavement each day and wore out four pairs of shoes each year. He walked swiftly — often hunched over a newspaper — slowing only to shout hellos to friends or give medical advice to those who asked for it.

I can’t believe Tom LaBonge had to get his quote in someone’s obituary.

“He had the greatest tan of anyone in town,” said City Councilman Tom LaBonge, who lives a few blocks from the quiet hillside home Abrams shared with his wife. Whenever LaBonge spotted Abrams striding down the sidewalk he would stop to shout, “What up, Doc?”

(Btw, Tom LaBonge called me last week! No, not to ask me out, as one of my exes guessed. He got my blog confused with the OTHER Griffith Park blog, and was calling to correct the facts about something published there!)

I saw someone on Facebook link to the article in the Eastsider, and one of the commenters there, instead of expressing regrets about the WM, who I would have called Reading Man, said it was a suicide, and wondered why the news was covering it up. Turns out he was right.

Today the LA Times reported:

Marc Abrams, the doctor known as the “walking man” for his shirtless walks around Silver Lake, died by drowning himself in his hot tub, a spokesman for the Los Angeles County coroner’s office said Monday.“He was found in the Jacuzzi with the Jacuzzi lid pulled over the Jacuzzi itself,” said Ed Winter, assistant chief of the Department of Coroner Investigations. “There was no suicide note found.”…

At the time of his death, Abrams was under investigation for prescribing drugs to a 25-year-old patient who died of an overdose, according to law enforcement authorities and a lawyer for the patient’s family.

What a strange way to commit suicide – drowning in the dark? Can one not lift the lid off a hot tub? There’s no air? And he was a fitness buff, too. He was probably proud of his tan, since he walked SHIRTLESS everywhere.

Poor guy.

PS. I think he may have been murdered.