(USA TODAY) A California auction house liquidator who had appeared on the A&E reality series Storage Wars was found dead Monday at work after being arrested over the weekend on drug possession charges.
The Ventura County Star reported that Mark Balelo, 40, of Simi Valley was discovered by authorities two days after being arrested in connection with possession of methamphetamines.
The Ventura County Medical Examiner's office was giving no official cause of death, but TMZ.com was reporting that he was found dead of carbon monoxide poisoning in a running car parked in his office garage.
Balelo, who had been featured as a buyer on several episodes of the hit cable reality series, also made the news in 2011 when he returned a stolen 1938 comic book worth $1 million to Nicolas Cage, its owner.
Storage Wars has been in the news over the past few months after star Dave Hester filed a wrongful-termination suit claiming that the show, in which buyers bid for the rights to the contents of abandoned storage lockers, was often staged for the cameras.
