UPDATE: Police Are Investigating Death at Abandoned Gas Station as Homicide

Vehicles from Concord police forensics and the county coroner’s office were on the scene Tuesday afternoon of an abandoned gas station at Monument Boulevard and Detroit Avenue, apparently removing a body. 

The case is being investigated as a homicide, said Concord police Lt. Garrett Voerge. "We have yet to positively identify the victim," he said in an interview Tuesday at 3:15 p.m.

Voerge declined to specify the injuries or say whether the victim was a man or a woman.

There was ragged bedding in a corner of the parking lot and within the garage bay of the former Beacon gas station. The coroner’s staff brought the body out from the former garage bay.

Police responded to a call about a possible dead body at the station at 12:20 a.m. Tuesday. They arrived to find the victim dead inside the building, said Voerge, and detectives and crime scene investigators were called to the scene. They were still there Tuesday afternoon.

The apparent death of a homeless man is evidence of “the need to open more homeless shelters,” said Jasmine Brown, 39, who was at the scene Tuesday.

Brown said homeless people sleep at the station, getting in through a hole in the fence on the Detroit Avenue side. She said she is homeless herself and lives out of a car.

The station is surrounded by a fence.