CHP Blames Riverside for Man’s Getaway

California Highway Patrol officials on Friday blamed the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department for allowing a key suspect in a string of armed robberies to go free from a Mission Viejo hospital.

CHP spokesmen in San Juan Capistrano said they had agreed to remove an armed guard from the hospital room of 24-year-old Anthony Garcia only after Riverside County sheriff’s detectives assured them that they would take control of the case. Garcia, who was never arrested, fled the Mission Hospital Regional Medical Center on crutches and in his hospital robe Nov. 13.

He continued to be the subject of a statewide manhunt Friday night.

The incident has outraged many, including doctors and hospital administrators who charge that the Riverside authorities did not arrest Garcia because they did not want to pay the Sun City man’s $37,964.49 hospital bill.

Trauma experts say that such efforts by law enforcement agencies to avoid liability for suspects’ medical bills have become a growing problem and the chairman of the Riverside County Board of Supervisors warned Friday that similar incidents could be repeated as regional governments’ financial resources continue to dwindle.

Garcia was admitted to the hospital Oct. 26, the day he allegedly rammed a stolen truck into a van driven by Richard E. Wheatfill, a San Juan Capistrano dentist. Wheatfill, a father of five who was heading to a Boy Scout camp, was critically injured and remains hospitalized at the medical center in Mission Viejo. Authorities said Garcia’s blood alcohol level--at 0.17%--was more than twice the legal limit at the time of the crash and intended to file drunk-driving charges.

The crash on Ortega Highway in San Juan Capistrano happened minutes after Garcia had allegedly robbed a motorist of his vehicle at gunpoint in the neighboring Riverside County town of Lake Elsinore. Garcia also is a suspect in several crimes committed in Riverside County, according to CHP and Riverside County sheriff’s officials.

Highway Patrol officials said Friday that they realized on the morning of Oct. 26 that the Riverside County criminal cases would get priority over the drunk-driving case Garcia would face in Orange County.

When Riverside County Sheriff’s Department officials indicated they wanted to take control of the case, CHP officials complied, according to Capt. Steve Malone of the CHP’s San Juan Capistrano office.

“They called and said, ‘Let us have him,’ ” Malone said. “We said we had him in custody and said, ‘Sure.’ . . . We kept a guard on him until they showed up.”

A trauma center nurse, who asked not to be named, said that on Oct. 26 several Riverside sheriff’s deputies relieved the CHP guard and then immediately attempted to take Garcia away from the hospital. But, she said, hospital officials could not release the suspect because he had suffered a broken hip and needed emergency treatment.

Doctors at the hospital said they told Riverside County sheriff’s detectives as early as Oct. 29 that Garcia’s condition had stabilized and that he could be taken to the jail ward at Riverside General Hospital. The suspect still required hip surgery, but it could have been performed there, they said.

Detectives, however, said that they would arrest Garcia only when he was released from the hospital, so that they could avoid liability for the sizable hospital bill. However, before his scheduled release, the Sun City man slipped out of the hospital.

“If anyone dropped the ball, it’s the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department and they should own up to it,” Malone said.

Officials with the Orange County district attorney’s office on Friday confirmed the CHP account. Deputy Dist. Atty. Wallace J. Wade, who heads the district attorney’s South County office, said he advised CHP officials in San Juan Capistrano to allow Riverside authorities to prosecute the drunk-driving case with the robbery warrants against Garcia.

“If a judge in Riverside County then determined that we would have to prosecute the drunk-driving case in Orange County, we were willing to do that,” Wade said.

Riverside County Sheriff’s Chief Deputy Bob Doyle said he could not comment on the CHP’s version of the case but insisted that his department was not to blame for allowing Garcia to go free.

“It’s an unfortunate situation, and I can see where the hospital would be frustrated,” Doyle said. “We did not arrest him, we did not send him to Mission Viejo and yet they feel that we should pay the bill. It would have been a different situation if we were chasing him and if we had sent him to Mission Viejo.”

Doyle said that Riverside County investigators did not arrest Garcia in the hospital because “no police agency under these circumstances is going to walk into the hospital, slap an arrest warrant (on an injured suspect) and put a guard at his door.”

However, chiefs of some police departments in Orange County said they would have placed Garcia under arrest with an armed guard at his door if faced with a similar situation.

But Doyle said his detectives received different information from hospital officials.

“We were told that Garcia couldn’t even walk, but the next thing we know is that he’s walking out of the hospital,” Doyle said. “There was a breakdown in communication. You got some unreasonable expectation on the part of the hospital because they want somebody to pay their bill, and they decided that we are that somebody.”

A. Norton Younglove, the chairman of the Riverside County Board of Supervisors, called the incident “a collection of screw-ups,” saying he did not know if the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department was solely responsible.

“This kind of problem will inevitably happen from time to time because we have a system that encourages these kinds of mistakes,” Younglove said, noting that Southland counties are overburdened with hospital bills for injured suspects. “It’s likely to happen more often as we hang at the edge of insolvency.”

Officials at the Mission Viejo hospital say cases such as Garcia’s threaten the health of the entire emergency care system. Police agencies that resist arresting injured prisoners in the hospital are becoming another part of the enormous problem of uncompensated hospital care, they say.

“The level of uncompensated care is becoming one of the major issues for health care systems in the state of California,” said Mission Hospital administrator Gary Fybe. “Trauma centers and emergency rooms have closed in a large part because of the disproportionate amount of uncompensated care. It is these kinds of cases that erode a system.”

While police search for Garcia, church members are keeping vigil at Wheatfill’s bedside.

Bishop Ken Virgin of the Capistrano Ward of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints described Wheatfill as “a devoted father and a great human being.”

He said the church has started a trust fund--the Richard Wheatfill Support Fund--to assist the family.

Robin Wheatfill said her family is overwhelmed by the misfortune but has been steeled in recent days by the support of church members and the public.

“My main concern is the well-being of my husband and the continuity of my family,” she said. “We’ve cried a lot and we hurt a lot, but the consequences in the long run are up to the Lord, not us.”

Sitting in his hospital room this week with family photographs and get-well cards posted on the walls, Wheatfill struggled to speak. He could not remember the accident.

“I’m devastated,” he said, barely whispering. “My life has been completely changed.

“My main concern is, if I’m not there, who is going to provide for my family? I’m the sole breadwinner,” he said.

Virgin said: “It’s an atrocity anyhow you take it. We’re even more outraged because this man (Garcia) is on the loose.”