San Francisco will pay $750,000 to a former city employee who says she was wrongly fired after she complained that her boss, the director of the city’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, likely threw out a human skull.
San Francisco supervisors voted unanimously on Tuesday to approve the settlement, resolving a lawsuit filed by Sonia Kominek-Adachi, a former autopsy technician, in 2024.
Kominek-Adachi discovered the missing skull while completing an inventory of body parts in 2023, according to a complaint filed in San Francisco Superior Court. The office was required to keep the skull on hand until the identity of the body could be determined.
But Kominek-Adachi suspected that her boss, David Serrano Sewell, who ran the medical examiner’s office, had tossed it while he “rushed” to clean the area where it was being stored before an inspection. Kominek-Adachi said she reported the missing skull to Sewell and chief examiners. Sewell never investigated its disappearance and instead tried to push her out of her job, she said.
Jen Kwart, a spokesperson for the City Attorney’s Office, said in a statement Tuesday that the skull had never left the medical examiner’s office. Still, she said that “the proposed settlement is an appropriate resolution given the inherent costs of continued litigation.”
Kominek-Adachi also said that Sewell had consistently discriminated against her and other women in the office, passing them over for promotion and sometimes insulting or shouting at them. She often received calls from him outside of her work hours, she said, and he made demeaning comments about her romantic relationship and facial expressions.
She was terminated in 2023 after she was promoted into a temporary, at-will position.
James Urbanic, a lawyer who represented Kominek-Adachi, said she was “pleased to put the matter behind her” and to have “her voice heard.”