Woes Mount for State Mental Hospital

On the eve of a long-scheduled federal inspection, the state’s largest mental hospital is contending with a recent surge in violence -- two patient homicides in the last three months.

Dwight Wenholz, a 43-year-old long-term patient at Patton State Hospital in San Bernardino was found dead on a bathroom floor late Wednesday, just days before the inspectors’ visit, which is set to begin Monday. He had been choked and slammed to the floor, police said.

Samuel Gomez Galindo, 33, a paranoid schizophrenic patient, was arrested and booked on suspicion of murder. He later tried to commit suicide in jail, his family said.

In September, Robert Lucas, 50, was choked and stabbed in the neck. Two patients, 32-year-old Jason Porter and 43-year-old Tom Smith, have been charged with his murder.

The slayings were the first since 1994 at Patton, which predominantly houses severely mentally ill people referred by the criminal courts.

Galindo’s most recent criminal offense before entering Patton was possession of a weapon while in jail. Smith had been convicted of assault with intent to commit rape and Porter of attempted murder.

The killings come at a time when California’s mental hospitals face heightened scrutiny from the U.S. Justice Department. In the past few years, the agency’s investigators have issued reports highly critical of two other state hospitals, Napa and Metropolitan, in Norwalk.

Among other things, they found that staffers did not do enough to prevent patients from harming themselves or one another.

Metropolitan also was found to have misdiagnosed, overmedicated and improperly restrained some patients.

Patton’s inspection is part of a systemwide probe that has caused tension between state and federal officials.

“I’m not nervous about the inspection per se,” said Patton Executive Director Octavio Carlos Luna. “They are going to come in and they’re reviewing the process of how we provide treatment....

“I am concerned,” he added, “that we have had these two tragic events, these two homicides, in three months.”

Luna said the slayings were unrelated, having occurred in separate units in different parts of the facility.

But he said both occurred at night, between about 10:45 and 11 p.m., about the time nurses and psychiatric technicians switch shifts. During the switch, nurses are still on the wards but are busy exchanging information on patients.

“The question is if they were properly dispersed through the unit like they normally would” be, Luna said.

He said bathrooms are checked every 15 minutes and that Wenholz was found during such a check.

Luna declined to discuss the death further, citing pending police and hospital investigations.

Police said there had been a long-running dispute between Galindo and Wenholz, who had been committed to Patton after making bomb threats.

Galindo’s relatives questioned the hospital’s supervision. His sister, Rachel, said in an interview that her brother had been asking for at least a year to transfer out of Patton. Barring release to a halfway house, he wanted to be transferred back to Atascadero State Hospital on the Central Coast, where he had been previously, she said.

Family members said he was more able to focus on a work program there and received better supervision.

He didn’t have problems with fights at Atascadero, Rachel Galindo said.

But at Patton things were different, Galindo told his family.

“He was letting us know he was having some problems with some guys there,” Rachel Galindo said. “He knows when the anger is getting the best of him. He tries to take whatever precautions. He kept letting them know [that he wanted a transfer], but no one did anything about it.”

Recently, Galindo had said he’d stopped going out into a yard with other patients and playing basketball because “there would be guys who wanted to fight,” his sister said.

During a visit just before the slaying, Galindo asked his father, Raymond, to pray with him over a Bible.

“I visited him last Wednesday and he said, ‘Dad, pray for me. Pray for protection over me,’ ” his father said. “I had asked him, ‘Son, you need to open up....You need to be more open and share things.’ ”

Rachel Galindo said she was shocked when she heard about the accusations against her brother.

“It’s tragic,” she said. “I wish we would have known more about what was going on.”

In general, Luna said, the hospital depends on staff and patients to notify officials when there is a problem in the units.

Luna said he held a monthly meeting recently with a council of patients and urged them to notify nurses of any concerns, including when they saw that a patient was being picked on.

Luna said crowding at Patton has made the situation more difficult. But in last week’s slaying, at least, it didn’t appear to be a factor, he said. Wenholz’s unit had 41 patients and was licensed for 40.

Even though the hospital is licensed for 1,287 beds, it has about 1,500 patients -- a problem that is expected to ease as the newly built Coalinga State Hospital takes in more patients.

Overall, Luna said, “It is more difficult for the individual [patient] to find quiet time, to find their own particular space, compared to the past.”

Times staff writer Lance Pugmire contributed to this report.