SEATTLE — Anthony Garver, the man accused of murder who escaped from the Washington psychiatric hospital, has been taken into custody by police. But officials say another patient has gone missing from Western State Hospital.
Officials said Friday that the patient left the facility Wednesday with an escorted group but didn’t return. The patient, who wasn’t identified, was committed to Western State Hospital after being deemed unfit to face trial on residential burglary charges and violation of a no-contact order.
The patient’s whereabouts aren’t known, and police have been notified. The patient was under less restrictive conditions than the two men who escaped out a window later the same day.
The Washington sheriff’s office that captured Garver gives much of the credit to a canine officer named Gunnar.
The dog found Garver, who was hiding under debris in the woods, signaling the officers.
“I was afraid this was going to go sideways. I’m glad it didn’t,” said spokesman Mark Gregory of the Spokane sheriff’s office.
Gregory said Saturday morning that the two human officers did their job Friday night, but Gunnar was the key to capturing Anthony Garver without injury to any of the humans.
Garver is being held in the Spokane jail under a U.S. marshal warrant. He was treated for dehydration after his capture, the sheriff’s office said.
Kathy Spears of the Washington Department of Social and Health Services expects to have an update Saturday afternoon about what will happen next to Garver, who was hiding in the woods near his family home around 8:15 p.m. Friday.
Jeremy Barclay, a spokesman for the Washington Department of Corrections, said his agency will continue to work with the Department of Social and Health Services on the case, even though Garver was under a civil commitment and had finished serving his incarceration period.
“We’re not sure of the next steps yet,” Barclay said.
Garver, 28, who is accused of torturing a woman to death, escaped from the psychiatric hospital Wednesday night. He crawled out a window of a locked, lower-security unit with another patient, Mark Alexander Adams, 58, who was caught the next day.
Garver was charged in 2013 with tying a 20-year-old woman to her bed with electrical cords, stabbing her 24 times in the chest and slashing her throat, prosecutors said.
Garver, who bought a bus ticket from Seattle to Spokane after he escaped, had last been seen on Thursday in the Spokane area where his parents live after his father called authorities to report his son had stopped by briefly.
Federal scrutiny intensified on Washington’s largest psychiatric hospital, whose history of attacks on patients and staff and a failure to improve safety was brought into sharp relief when Anthony Garver fled a lower-security ward with another patient who was caught Thursday. Garver was charged with torturing a woman to death but found too mentally ill for trial.
U.S. regulators are investigating a recent violent attack on a hospital worker and a patient-on-patient sexual assault at Western State Hospital. A workplace inspection released Thursday also found a series of missteps that posed safety risks, including unlocked rooms, unattended items that could be used as weapons and workers who abandoned their posts instead of watching patients.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has repeatedly cited the facility over safety concerns and threatened to cut millions in federal funding. An agency spokesman says the hospital is under additional scrutiny over the escape and recent assaults.
Garver, 28, had been last seen in the Spokane area where his parents live. He and patient Mark Alexander Adams, 58, crawled out a window of their ground-floor room Wednesday night.
Adams, who had been charged with domestic assault in 2014, was captured the next morning. Both he and Garver were found too mentally ill to stand trial and a judge ordered them held at the hospital as a danger to themselves or others.
Garver had been charged in 2013 with tying a 20-year-old woman to her bed with electrical cords, stabbing her 24 times in the chest and slashing her throat. The murder charge was dismissed after a judge said mental health treatment to prepare him for trial was not working.
State officials did not explain why Garver, an ex-felon with a history of running from authorities, was kept in a lower-security area. Some high-security units require patient checks every 15 minutes, but Garver was not placed in one, staffers say.
“He was in a locked area with locked windows and hourly checks,” said Kathy Spears, a spokeswoman for the Department of Social and Health Services, which oversees the state’s mental health care.
The hospital says the men were discovered missing 45 minutes after they were last seen, but police said it took an hour and a half. Security staff was inspecting the windows Friday to determine how the men loosened the bolts.
The history of violence at the facility stretches back years. Hundreds of employees have suffered concussions, fractures and cuts in assaults by patients, resulting in $6 million in workers compensation claims between 2013 and 2015. Patients also have attacked other patients, causing serious injuries.
Federal regulators sent notices to the hospital four times last year after inspectors found it failed to ensure the safety. The facility has until May 3 to address the violations or lose millions in funding.
Most recently, a patient with a history of violent behavior choked and punched a mental health technician March 26, according to an internal report. A March 23 report said a male patient slipped out of his monitors and was found in a bathroom with another male patient, who said he was sexually assaulted.
The hospital faces new scrutiny after the two attacks and escape, said Steven Chickering, associate regional administrator of a division of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
“CMS was aware of all three of these situations, and cannot comment on how they will affect Western State Hospital’s federal funding,” Chickering said in an email. “CMS is currently following its procedures and processes for these situations.”
In addition, the hospital’s safety and emergency management manager sent a memo to staff Thursday citing numerous violations observed during a recent review.
Some of the problems involved how the hospital is laid out, “but they also observed actions by staff that could pose a safety and/or security risk,” Pamela Rieta’s memo said.
Her team saw a patient wearing a long necklace, telephones with long cords, an unattended chair and other items that could be used as weapons left at the nurse’s station, the memo said.
Cabinets and lockers in activity rooms and kitchen areas were unlocked and unattended. Patients returning from ground privileges were not scanned for contraband. Several kitchen doors were propped open without staffers present, allowing patients to enter, the memo said.
The team also saw staff leave their posts “to hang out and talk … not observing the patients.”
The state’s Behavioral Health Administration, which oversees the facility south of Seattle, is conducting a safety review and will bring in outside experts to help, assistant director Carla Reyes said.
As for Garver, he had been last seen Thursday in Spokane after he got on a bus from Seattle. said.
Garver’s father, who lives in the area, called authorities Thursday to report his son had stopped by.
“The father said he was there for a very short time, got spooked and left,” Spokane County sheriff’s Deputy Mark Gregory said.
The deputy said he hopes Garver will be held in a more-secure facility.
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