How Did a Google Engineer, 23, End Up Floating Dead in the San Francisco Bay?
A missing Google employee was found dead last week in the San Francisco Bay and authorities are investigating how she came to be there.
The body of Chuchu Ma, a 23-year-old software engineer, was discovered on Dec. 7 floating in a drainage canal by a bicyclist along a trail in Sunnyvale, California, according to ABC News. Ma had been reported missing by her boyfriend in Mountain View, a few miles away, that same day.
According to local TV station KTVU, investigators said Ma was half-naked when dive-team officers with the Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Office in California removed her body from the water. It’s not clear if she was dumped into the bay or if her body floated from a different location, according to the outlet.
“The medical examiner and us and our detective units are actively working the investigation to see what there were. We don’t know the circumstances of why the body was in the water,” Sunnyvale Department of Public Safety Capt. Shawn Ahearn told KTVU.
“It’s safe for everybody to use that trail. There’s no danger to the public,” Ahearn told the Palo Alto Daily Post on Wednesday. “We don’t make any assumptions. We don’t make any speculation. It’s an active investigation, looking at all possibilities.”
Investigators are waiting for an autopsy report, Sunnyvale authorities said in a brief news release. Results are expected in January at the earliest, the Daily Post reports.
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Neither the Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Office nor the Sunnyvale Department of Public Safety were available for further comment to PEOPLE.
Google reportedly confirmed Ma’s death in a statement, saying she “was an excellent software engineer in our developer product team.”
“We are devastated to learn of her passing and our deepest condolences are with her family and friends,” the company said, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
Ma’s LinkedIn page shows she graduated with a computer-science degree from the University of Texas at Austin in 2016, earning a National Merit Scholarship.
She had previously interned at Yahoo in Sunnyvale and at Telogis Inc. in Austin before joining Google in July 2016.
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