Top Hollywood Publicist Killed in Beverly Hills Shooting, Car Crash

At the time of her death, Chasen was also working with 20th Century Fox on the Oscar campaign for Michael Douglas in "Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps," according to the trade publication Variety.

Obviously a case of a seriously distracted driver.

RIP.

I read some of the comments by her “friends.” LA and Hollywood - what a snake pit. They would say one or two nice things then something slightly nasty.

Hollywood and the movie making business - just a few blocks away from the porn capital of the world in Van Nuys/Chatsworth/Canoga Park. Waxman and Berman’s stomping grounds.

This looks more like a hit than a drive by. 5 shots.

A carjacking turned murder?

That's what I think. Here's the Google Street View of the light pole where the car was found. I corroborated this with some early coverage, including a helicopter shot of the car which showed the distinctive manhole covers to the left of the light. This is actually about 1/4 mile south of Sunset Blvd., and the local on-the-scene Fox coverage gave the location accurately in the opening hours of the case, but it has evolved to "along Sunset Blvd." in later coverage.

I hypothesize she might have come north on Linden and made a left just north of the light pole where there's a triangular traffic island. She would have stopped there, and been vulnerable to being jumped. If she tried to pull away, she could have been shot and crashed as she did in a plausible scenario. If she was just gliding south along Whittier from Sunset, it doesn't seem likely that she would have been jumped in this way.

I don't know if she lived right near there, but it seems likely. The "after party" at the W Hotel was west of there on the other side of the Los Angeles Country Club. She would have had to go around that to the north or the south to get where she was, and if her destination wasn't very nearby, there wouldn't be any reason to be driving by there.

None of this contradicts a "hit", but I just think a car-jacking attempt is more likely.

Looks like most of my speculations are based on picking the wrong W Hotel, although I stand by the crash location. I looked for the W Hotel, Los Angeles, but as per a new LA Times article, the party was at the W Hollywood Hotel, which is east of the crash site and north of Sunset Blvd. The article indicates that she was probably cutting from Sunset down to Wilshire on Whittier.

This makes the car-jacking scenario problematical. It's hard to see how or why a lurking car-jacker would stop a moving car. I think there's got to be a lot of clues in the physical evidence about what exactly transpired. I hope the police are able to put something together.

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