NEW ORLEANS - The mysterious death of a former bartender at Oz nightclub on Bourbon Street is now being investigated by New Orleans Police Department homicide detectives.
Even though no cause of death has been determined, family members and friends say they're happy the NOPD is looking more closely into the death of Danny Bettencourt.
"There was nothing strange about him or anything," Derek Galose told Eyewitness News last week about the last time he saw Bettencourt alive.
Galose said Bettencourt had been at his house doing laundry and that Bettencourt wanted to go back to Oz afterward. Galose walked Bettencourt back to the bar at around 3:30 in the morning on Labor Day.
Bettencourt had been a bartender at Oz until the Friday before his death. The club's manager, Madeline Schwartz, said Bettencourt was let go that day. Friends say Bettencourt had been planning to move out of town and that he was still friends with the employees at the club.
According to Schwartz, Bettencourt is seen entering the bathroom on the club's surveillance video before his death, but the events immediately leading up to his death were not captured on camera.
Just about two hours after Bettencourt had returned to Oz that night, he ended up face-down, unresponsive on the floor.
Friends and family members immediately started questioning what happened to him.
"The story that we're hearing is that our friend Danny, who's a former employee of that barroom was placed in a head lock by his former co-workers until he was lifeless on the barroom floor," said Todd Seal, another one of Bettencourt's friends.
The narrative on the initial police report says someone had called to report a disturbance or a fight, that Bettencourt had become "irate" and had become "uncontrollable," trying to fight them. The report also says Bettencourt pulled out the tooth of a fellow bartender.
The narrative goes on to say that Bettencourt's friends told police they were able to "control him" until officers arrived.
"There's a lot of people who know what happened. We're hoping more people come forward," Seal said.
The report says Bettencourt was face-down with his head in the lap of one of his friends when police arrived at the scene. According to the report, they ordered everyone away from Bettencourt and called EMS to come start CPR on him.
Bettencourt was later pronounced dead at the hospital.
The nature of the investigation into what happened to Danny Bettencourt at Oz has changed three times since his death. First, it was a fight or a disturbance, then it was written up as a medical call. Now homicide detectives are looking into it.
"The direction the investigation goes in is going to be determined by the cause of death," said Eric Hessler, a former homicide detective and current defense attorney unrelated to the case.
"If his cause of death was due to blunt force trauma or a physical injury it should be able to be determined by the coroner, and that doesn't appear to be the case as of now," Hessler said, after considering the facts of the case.
Orleans Parish Coroner Dr. Jeffrey Rouse has said there were no gross anatomical signs of trauma in the initial autopsy, but said it did reveal a potential cardiac abnormality.
During their investigation into Bettencourt's death, the coroner says he and his investigators found the circumstances "Sufficiently suspicious to warrant alerting NOPD."
NOPD Spokesman Tyler Gamble confirmed that's why they assigned a homicide detective to the case, even though the official cause of Bettencourt's death is still undetermined.
The coroner is still waiting on toxicology tests to classify Bettencourt's official cause of death.
