A third patient has escaped from problem-plagued Western State Hospital and remains at large, officials said Friday.
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Garver, 28, had been in the hospital because he was accused of killing a woman by stabbing her two dozen times.
The escape is the latest in a litany of problems at the 800-bed hospital south of Tacoma, where violent assaults on both staff and patients have occurred.
DSHS said the patient was still missing as of Friday afternoon. Garver crawled out a window of a locked, lower-security unit on Wednesday with another patient who was caught the next day. Canine units detected his track and led officers to Garver hiding under a pile of debris.
“Food and water were his enemy”, Knezovich said in a news conference Friday night. He was severely dehydrated.
Detectives linked Garver, who sometimes uses the last name Burke, to the woman’s death based on evidence from the scene and surveillance video footage showing the two of them together in the days before her death, the sheriff’s office said.
“CMS was aware of all three of these situations, and can not comment on how they will affect Western State Hospital’s Federal funding”, he said in an email. She said she hopes funding added during the recent legislative session will help move the state from being ranked lowest in the nation.
He was taken to a hospital to receive medical attention for dehydration and will be taken to Spokane County Jail, Knezovich said. Authorities there searched for him in a wooded area with dogs, a SWAT team and helicopters after he stopped at his parents’ home in the area. The murder charge was dismissed after a judge said mental health treatment to prepare him for trial was not working.
Garver escaped earlier this week along with another man who was also captured. He was found too mentally ill for trial and was being held at Western State Hospital after a judge found that he was a danger to himself or others.
Adams, 59, was arrested Thursday without incident near a church and elementary school in Des Moines.
State officials would 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. Security staff was trying to determine how the men loosened the bolts on the locked windows, state officials said.
Garver was under more restrictive conditions than the other patient missing on Friday from the hospital.
The patient left the facility with an escorted group but didn’t return. The hospital did not identify the patient. 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.
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More than half of the 700 injuries reported by nurses, psychiatric technicians, counselors, psychiatrists and other workers during that period were caused by violent patient assaults, the records said.
