A visitor to San Francisco's Ocean Beach made a rather morbid discovery on Sunday morning when they found a running shoe that had washed ashore; a severed human foot was still inside of the footwear, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
Upon discovering the foot near Taraval Street the visitor was able to wave down a beach patrol from the National Park Service. Mark Powning, an investigator with San Francisco's Chief Medical Examiner's office, believes that whatever happened to detach the foot happened a long time ago, the San Francisco Chronicle reports.
"What we have is a human foot, with some associated tissue, inside of a shoe," Powning said. "It probably was rolling around the seabed for a while."
The foot, encased in a green and black mesh Puma running shoe, was alone; no other body parts washed up on the shore, according to the Associated Press.
The incident brings to mind a series of severed feet that washed ashore in Canada starting in 2007. Starting in 2007 and continuing through 2011 a series of 11 feet appeared seemingly out of nowhere along a 125 mile stretch of land in Canada, according to the Daily Beast.
The one thing that connected all of the feet was that they were all still wearing buoyant tennis shoes. At first it was assumed that the shoes belonged to bodies that had been chopped and disposed of in the water; this proved to be untrue when coroner's revealed that the feet had no signs of being sawed off from the rest of the leg, according to the Daily Beast.
"Even a bad episode of 'The Sopranos' will cough up a couple of other body parts than feet," Mark Mendelson, a forensics expert told the Daily Beast. "There are so many coincidences taking place, I don't think you can write it off. Everybody who jumps off a bridge is wearing runners? It's bizarre. The common denominators are such that you've got to wonder. Until you can show me something pathologically concrete that this is a natural separation of that foot from a body, then I'm saying you've got to think dirty."
Of the eleven feet only two came from the same person. One of the feet that was identified belonged to a man who had a history of mental illness and had been "distraught" before disappearing from his home, leading police to believe that the man committed suicide in a manner where his body ended up in the Fraser River, according to the Daily Beast.
San Francisco police are still baffled as to where the foot that washed ashore on Sunday came from but they are conducting an investigation to find out what they can.
