Police say a 49-year-old woman who was found dead Monday afternoon in an Anchorage park was seen drinking with a small group of people in the same park earlier that day.
Police identified the woman Tuesday as Viola Serrano of Anchorage. Police won't know if alcohol played a role in her death until the state medical examiner's office finishes its investigation, said Lt. David Parker, a police spokesman.
Passersby found Serrano's body at about 4:40 p.m. Monday in the southeast corner of Earl and Muriel King Park, which is on A Street between West and East 12th Avenue, police say.
There were no immediate signs of foul play and no signs that the death was a suicide, Parker said.
Serrano had been staying at a nearby hotel for "a fairly extended period" while her husband was out of town for work, Parker said.
She had talked to her husband on the phone at about 1 p.m. Monday, police said. She was seen later that afternoon drinking with a small group of people at the park, a witness told police.
Two people walking across the park discovered her body and tried to wake her up, Parker said. Efforts to revive her were unsuccessful.
"She'd had, previously, some pretty significant health problems," Parker said.
A year ago the body of a 25-year-old woman was discovered in the same park, one of a string of outdoor deaths reported in Anchorage over the past 16 months.
A neighbor said she doesn't let her kids play in the park because people often drink there, and around noon Tuesday six or seven men were lying on the closely cropped grass, drinking from bottles.
Most of the more than 20 people found dead outdoors in Anchorage since May 2009 were severely intoxicated. Many were homeless.
Parker initially saw few parallels between those deaths and Serrano's.
"The only similarity is that (Serrano) was outdoors. But this woman was not camping out. She had a warm place to stay," Parker said early Tuesday.
Parker noted that the cause of her death isn't known yet.
"Many, many people drink alcohol, but they don't necessarily die of it," Parker said.
Serrano's criminal history includes convictions for child abuse and violating conditions of release in a 1998 case and a no-contest plea to drunken driving in 1999, according to an online database of court records. More recently, prosecutors dismissed a 2008 charge of disorderly conduct/public sex.
Daily News photo editor Richard Murphy contributed to this report. Twitter updates: twitter.com/adnvillage. Call Kyle Hopkins at 257-4334.
By KYLE HOPKINS
khopkins@adn.com