July 22--A man found dead in a vehicle in a Pacific Palisades neighborhood and later tied to a home where police found a massive cache of firearms was a 60-year-old longtime Los Angeles County resident who mostly kept to himself, according to interviews.
Shirley Anderson, the longtime partner of the man's late father, said she hadn't seen Jeffrey Alan Lash since 2010 when she got a call last week from the L.A. County coroner's office.
A coroner's official, she said, told her that authorities had just found a man's body inside an abandoned vehicle on Palisades Drive, and that they believed the man was Lash. Anderson said Lash had not provided her with an address or phone number for years.
"We never knew where he lived," she said.
Coroner Chief Craig Harvey said his office has been in contact with a distant family member of the dead man, whom investigators believe is Lash. A formal identification has yet to be made.
After discovering Lash's body, Los Angeles police investigators found more than 1,200 firearms and tons of ammunition inside his fiancee's Pacific Palisades home.
The fiancee's attorney, Harland Braun, also identified the dead man as Lash.
LAPD Deputy Chief Kirk Albanese said the private gun collection was probably worth a small fortune.
"There are a lot of expensive guns here," he said.
Albanese said the man was a collector and there was no evidence he ever sold weapons or was a licensed firearms dealer.
Anderson said she was stunned to learn of Lash's death.
Born in the mid-1950s, Lash grew up in a modest Westchester neighborhood, she said. His mother was a pianist and his father was a microbiologist who owned a medical laboratory, said Anderson, who said she had known Lash for at least 25 years.
For a while it appeared that Lash would follow in his father's footsteps.
In the 1980s, he told his parents he was attending UCLA and studying to become a scientist. But he dropped out and never returned, she said.
UCLA spokesman Ricardo Vasquez said Lash was a student at one point but said he could not release details about his enrollment because Lash had requested that his records remain private.
Lash's life become somewhat of a mystery even to those who previously knew him well.
Anderson, 93, said she knew little about what he did after he left UCLA because his communication with the family was limited. He never told her what he did for a living, she said.
"He was just a loner, as far as we were concerned," she said. "He just became weird because he changed all of a sudden."
Anderson said Lash was sick and at one point sought holistic medicine for treatment. Police said he had late-stage cancer when he died.
Anderson said she only found out that Lash had a fiancee from news articles following his death. Anderson never knew Lash was a gun collector, but she said he used to frequent gun shops.
"He was not very forthcoming about what he was doing," Anderson said. "He had to be doing something to collect all those guns."
