Police Reviewing the Handling of Escaped Patient : Ventura: Neighbors of the county medical center urge more security after the man allegedly killed a woman at her home.

Ventura police are reviewing their handling of an escaped hospital patient suspected of killing a 90-year-old woman shortly after two officers decided not to arrest him, officials said Monday.

“We’re trying to see what happened, what led up to this tragic death,” Police Capt. Pat Rooney said Monday. He said the results of the inquiry will probably be announced today.

Meanwhile, the victim’s daughter, Jackie Thetford, launched a crusade for better security at the Ventura County Medical Center and the county mental health and juvenile facilities nearby. Thetford and other neighbors have scheduled a public meeting Saturday to discuss a petition to the Board of Supervisors, which oversees the county complex.

“I want some kind of security in these places where they have these patients,” Thetford said. “Right now they’re roaming around.”

A patient from the medical center, Kevin Kolodziej, broke through a chest restraint on his bed Friday morning, walked out the front door unchallenged and stabbed Velasta Johnson at her home around the corner, police said.

Between the escape at 7:30 a.m. and the slaying less than an hour later, two police officers found Kolodziej in a garage near the medical center, police said. The officers tried unsuccessfully to persuade him to return to the hospital. The officers left him alone after learning that a psychiatric team had already interviewed him and found no mental-health grounds for holding him.

One focus of the police inquiry, Rooney said, is whether the two officers were aware of a 911 call reporting that Kolodziej had entered another home and confronted the residents shortly before police found him. David Brom, the San Pablo Street resident who called 911, said the illegal entry should have been enough to justify an arrest.

Thetford agreed. “He was known to be dangerous. Somebody screwed up, and it cost my mother her life.”

Rooney said the medical center occasionally calls police for help in locating an escapee, even when there is no legal means to force the patient to return.

“It’s a service to the hospital,” Rooney said. “Sometimes we can talk a patient into going back.”

Kolodziej, 25, had been in the intensive care unit of the county medical center since Jan. 5, when he was admitted for treatment of self-inflicted stab wounds to the throat, chest and stomach. During his stay at the medical center, police were summoned at least once because Kolodziej had been violent and abusive to hospital staff, Rooney said.

Medical center officials have not disclosed whether it was the alleged abuse that prompted them to attach a chest restraint to Kolodziej’s bed. An administrator said she could not discuss the case.

The county’s deputy director of mental health, Duane Essex, said Monday that he was not familiar with details of the case, but he acknowledged that a county mental-health team had examined Kolodziej. The team, which normally includes a psychiatrist and several other professionals, apparently decided that he did not meet any of the mental-health criteria needed to hold a person against his will, Essex said.

“There was no admission,” Essex said. “He was not a mental health client.”

To hold someone against his will, Essex said, the evaluation team would have to find that he presented a danger to himself or others, or that he had grave mental disabilities. If any of those criteria are met, the patient can be held at a mental health facility for 72 hours, and the confinement can be extended after a hearing.

Essex said mental-health teams are often called to the county medical center to evaluate patients. If the team determines that a patient is dangerous, he often is transferred immediately to the 28-bed mental hospital if his medical condition permits.

At the mental hospital, patients considered dangerous are placed in a locked room or are kept under one-on-one supervision around the clock. Patients who are not deemed to be dangerous are restrained with leg braces but are not as closely monitored, Essex said. Sometimes those patients slip away, he said.

“We have AWOLs,” Essex said. “It’s not a locked unit. That’s why we have to be very careful” in evaluating patients.

Essex acknowledged that deciding whether a patient is dangerous is an inexact science. “You can always find instances when someone’s prediction didn’t come true,” he said. “That’s why we have a multidisciplinary team.”

In August, he said, construction will begin on a new 44-bed facility next to the mental hospital. The building, scheduled to be completed in August, 1993, has been designed to keep all patients in locked areas, regardless of whether they are considered dangerous or not, Essex said.

Some neighbors want immediate improvements in security, especially at the mental hospital.

“The frequency of walkaways from this facility is alarming,” says the flyer that Brom and Thetford are distributing in the neighborhood. The day after the slaying, Brom said, he and his wife, Debi Brom, photographed a patient in leg shackles and pajamas at San Pablo Street and St. Paul Drive.

“He looked dazed and confused,” Debi Brom said. The couple called the mental hospital, which picked up the patient. Other neighbors said they frequently see patients wandering the streets in shackles.

Debi Brom said she has little faith in Essex’s assurances that only patients who are not dangerous can get out of the facility. “I’m sorry, I can’t buy that,” she said. “The leg restraints indicate there’s some kind of a problem there. . . . Even though they haven’t done something yet, they have the potential of doing something.

“Like this guy,” she said, referring to Kolodziej. “His suicide didn’t work, so he did something more drastic the next time.”

Kolodziej, whom police described as a drifter from Virginia Beach, Va., is being held in Ventura County Jail with bail set at $250,000. Deputy Dist. Atty. Saundra K. Brewer said he probably will be arraigned Wednesday.

The neighborhood meeting is scheduled for 1 p.m. Saturday at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church parish hall, 3290 Loma Vista Road. Thetford, who handed out flyers in the neighborhood Monday, said residents must act quickly.

“If you let it go, it gets forgotten,” she said. “I don’t want it forgotten. I want something done.

“If I sit here and don’t say something, I bury my mother and it’s over. How about the next victim? Because there will be another one.”

Father Jerome Kahler, rector of St. Paul’s, said he agreed to provide the hall because he shares his neighbors’ concerns. The church and adjacent school, which has 205 pupils, are almost directly across Loma Vista from the county complex.

“The fact is, we see homeless and mentally ill people on the streets who come from those institutions,” Kahler said. “A traumatic incident like this brings out fears in people: Am I safe in my home?”

Ventura police are satisfied with security at the county complex, Capt. Rooney said. He said county officials recognize the need for more locked rooms for mental health patients and are working to provide them.

“I think the agencies do the best job they can,” Rooney said. But he said he can sympathize with residents who feel otherwise. “In their minds, it’s not secure.”

He said the department will send a representative to the meeting Saturday if organizers request one.

Ventura Mayor Greg Carson also expressed sympathy for Johnson’s family and said he met Monday with Police Chief Richard Thomas to discuss the case.

“I’m satisfied that police followed their procedures,” Carson said, “but I certainly can understand how the family would feel--that the police came in contact with him, that they had him in their hands.”

Times staff writer Mack Reed contributed to this story.