Samuel Bond Haskell IV Case File: Charges, Death in Custody and Dismissal

The criminal case is over without a verdict. Haskell was found dead in his cell at the Twin Towers Correctional Facility on Sat. July 12, 2025. On Mon. July 14, when his preliminary hearing was due to begin, Deputy DA Beth Silverman told Judge Lisa B. Lench of his death, and the case was dismissed at the defense’s request.⁴¹¹ The medical examiner ruled the death a suicide.⁸ He had pleaded not guilty in January 2024 and had not changed that plea.²¹²

Tonight’s check found the DA’s release of July 14, 2025, still online. LAPD’s victim pages for Mei Haskell, Yanxiang Wang and Gaoshan Li are also still online and still read “Arrest Made: Yes.”³¹³⁹¹⁰ The Superior Court’s online case index was not searched directly, so the dismissal rests on the City News Service court report and the DA’s release. No later criminal proceedings were found.

Silverman told the judge she had “believed” the hearing “was going to be a guilty plea.” Haskell’s lawyer, Joseph A. Weimortz Jr., said his client “was willing to plead” to avoid more media exposure.⁴ No plea was entered. A plea the defendant never made is not a conviction, and nothing in the record changes his plea of not guilty.²

The official record establishes the following. Police found a woman’s torso in an Encino dumpster on Nov. 8, 2023, and the medical examiner identified it as Mei Li Haskell’s.⁵³ Her mother and stepfather, who lived with her, have not been found.⁹¹⁰ Her husband was arrested, charged with all three murders and held without bail.⁵¹⁷ He pleaded not guilty, died in custody and was never tried.²⁴

The DA’s office listed the evidence it “would have presented” at the preliminary hearing: the day laborers’ account, video, blood and DNA results, the contents of a rented SUV, receipts, cash and travel tickets.³ A judge never ruled on any of it, and the defense never cross-examined a witness. This file treats every item as an allegation and attributes it (§09).

The family lived in a single-story house in the 4100 block of Coldstream Terrace in Tarzana, in the west San Fernando Valley.⁵¹¹ The torso was found in the rear parking lot of a commercial building near Ventura Boulevard and Rubio Avenue in Encino, a strip of banks, a hair salon and a restaurant, according to the LA Times.⁵²³ The DA places the dumpster in the 16000 block of Ventura Boulevard.¹

According to the DA’s office, Haskell rented an Airbnb in Tarzana in October 2023 for Nov. 6 to Nov. 18 and rented an SUV on Nov. 3, “prior to the murders.”³ The office said he bought a one-way ticket to Japan on Oct. 21 and a round-trip ticket for a 27-year-old girlfriend for Nov. 28 to Dec. 12. It also said he had told her in October that his children would soon be living with his parents.³ It cited two hardware-store receipts dated Oct. 6 and Oct. 20.³ None of this was tested in court.

The DA alleges the three victims were killed “on or about Nov. 6, 2023” in the home they shared with Haskell.³ The office’s 2023 release says they were last seen on or about that date.¹ According to the DA, Haskell stayed at the Airbnb with the children after that.³

The DA says Haskell hired day laborers and paid them $500 to take heavy black plastic trash bags away from the house. After driving off, the workers opened one and saw human remains. They brought the bags and the money back, photographed him, the bags and the house, and alerted police. Officers came for a welfare check and found no one at home and the bags gone.³

The workers told NBC4 that he first said the bags held rocks and then Halloween decorations, and that the bags felt soft. The LA Times reported that they called the California Highway Patrol first and then LAPD.²⁰²⁴ In 2025 The Guardian reported that the workers spoke only Spanish and were not taken seriously when they first reported what they had found.¹⁸

According to the DA, video shows Haskell that afternoon driving into a parking lot a short distance from his home, taking a large trash bag from the trunk of his Tesla and putting it in a dumpster in Encino.³ The LA Times described a video obtained by Fox News showing “a person believed to be Haskell” doing this at about 4:45 p.m.²⁰ The DA says other surveillance video shows him moving more bags from the Tesla into the rented SUV and leaving the Tesla on the street. The Tesla, registered to Mei Haskell, was found there, near the Airbnb.³

LAPD said that at about 6 a.m. on Wed. Nov. 8, 2023, “an individual looking through dumpster bins” found a bag containing a woman’s torso and called police.⁵ News reports described him as homeless or unhoused and looking for recyclables.¹⁵¹⁷ Detectives traced the case to the home on Coldstream Terrace.⁵

Police arrested Haskell the same day at the Westfield Topanga mall in Canoga Park, at about 11:30 a.m., ABC7 reported.¹⁷³ LAPD booked him on suspicion of murder and set bail at $2 million.⁵ The DA says he was driving the rented SUV and carrying a folding knife.³ The children were at school, and police found them safe.¹⁷²¹

The DA’s 2025 summary says police found a loaded revolver, ammunition, a military-style knife and passports for Haskell, his wife and the three children in the SUV. It says DNA testing linked the knife to all three victims and the gun to Mei Haskell and Gaoshan Li.³ The office says officers recovered eight trash bags at the home. It says they held bloody bedding and tools, items the DA said were used for dismemberment, and the two older victims’ canes. It also says forensic testing found that “large amounts of blood evidence” had been cleaned up inside.³ In November 2023 a detective said only that “blood evidence and other items” were found at the home.¹⁶

Robbery-Homicide Division took over the case. On Nov. 12, 2023, LAPD asked the public for help finding Mei Li Haskell, Gaoshan Li and Yanxiang Wang, and two missing vehicles.⁵ The LA Times later reported that the two vehicles, missing from the Tarzana property, had been found in the San Fernando Valley.²¹ The medical examiner identified the torso as Mei Haskell’s by kinship DNA analysis in December 2023.³⁶ Her parents have never been found.³⁹¹⁰

The DA charged Haskell with three counts of murder, one for each victim, and alleged the special circumstance of multiple murders. If he had been convicted as charged, the maximum sentence was life in prison without the possibility of parole.¹³²⁵ He was held without bail from his first court appearance until his death.⁷¹²

A preliminary hearing is where a judge decides whether there is enough evidence for a case to go to trial.⁴ Haskell’s hearing had been scheduled for July 14, 2025, and never took place.³ No witness testified, no evidence was admitted, and no judge or jury made any finding. The dismissal ended the case without a ruling on the evidence.⁴

On July 14, 2025, the DA’s office published the evidence it said it “would have presented” at the preliminary hearing.³ The table sets it out item by item. Each line is the prosecution’s description. The defense never answered it in court, and no judge ruled on whether any of it was admissible or enough for a trial.

“The remains of Yanxiang Wang and Gaoshan Li have never been found,” the DA said in July 2025.³ LAPD’s pages for both say their remains “have not been located.”⁹¹⁰ In November 2023, Silverman said no other bags containing remains had been recovered: “I don’t need a body to charge a murder.”⁷ NBC LA reported in January 2024 that no further remains of Mei Haskell had been found.⁶

No motive was proved. Police had not confirmed one, the LA Times reported.¹⁹ DA Hochman spoke of “reasons we will never entirely know.”³ Mei Haskell’s relatives told the LA Times they knew of no fights or talk of divorce, but that money had been a strain.²¹¹⁹ The DA cited an affair and plans to travel to Japan, but did not state a motive.³ This file does not offer one.

The Sheriff’s Department said Haskell was found dead at about 4:20 a.m. on Sat. July 12, 2025, at the Twin Towers Correctional Facility in downtown Los Angeles.⁴ The department’s Homicide Bureau investigated, as it does for deaths in its custody.¹¹⁴ The medical examiner ruled the death a suicide; its report was made public on Oct. 21, 2025.⁸ NBC LA reported that he had been under “moderate monitoring” as a self-harm risk.¹² The LA Times reported that his was the 26th death in the county jail system that year.¹¹

At what was to have been the preliminary hearing, Silverman told Judge Lisa B. Lench of the death. The case was dismissed at the defense’s request.⁴ Friends of Mei Haskell attended. Jay Cieplik said outside court that she had been “a devoted mom” and that her parents were “devoted grandparents.”⁴

DA Hochman said: “Instead of standing before a judge and answering for the crimes he’s been charged with, the defendant managed to escape justice.” He said the family had been “robbed of their chance to face him.”³ That is the prosecutor’s view, not a court’s finding.

Weimortz said his client was “not afraid of prison, but he was afraid of an even larger media spectacle,” and feared what coverage would do to his children.⁴¹² He said the Haskell family “grieves every single life lost in this case.”⁴