Mental Patient Finds Refuge : Ventura: The county health unit takes in a schizophrenic who had run away from a Chatsworth center and was denied readmittance.

Starving and emaciated, a walkaway psychiatric patient was hospitalized Wednesday in Ventura, eight days after the Chatsworth mental health facility that was his home for eight years refused to readmit him.

The Chatsworth Health and Rehabilitation Center’s decision to turn away schizophrenic patient Bob Gennette was completely legal, mental health officials said. But the incident has angered his mother, has disturbed his legal guardian and seemed wrong to police investigating his disappearance.

Gennette said that, after he escaped from the locked facility on April 29, he walked the streets of the San Fernando Valley, surviving for five days on candy bars he bought with money cadged from passersby.

He said he wanted to return to the center for a proper meal, but the staff there would not let him back in.

“I didn’t know what to do,” said Gennette, now undergoing treatment for his schizophrenia at the Ventura County Mental Health Department’s inpatient unit. “I was very hungry.”

But the Chatsworth center’s administrator, Emmanuel Ruiz, said that, by failing to return within 72 hours, Gennette had given up his bed and could not regain it without going through proper channels.

“That’s the way the system is. It’s the mental health system,” Ruiz said.

Gennette’s legal guardian, Marybeth Peterson, confirmed that state licensing laws require patients to be discharged if they walk away from psychiatric facilities for more than 72 hours.

“When somebody splits, seven times out of 10, within a day or two, they’re back,” said Peterson, who acts as a court advocate for the mentally ill. “But there’s no knowing. In an instance such as this, we needed to get him to an acute care (facility) where he could get the intensive care he needs.”

The California psychiatric commitment law is the bottleneck, mental health officials said.

The mentally ill can be committed against their will only if they are judged to be a danger to themselves or others.

But police and Arlene Gennette said that, after turning Bob Gennette away, staff at the Chatsworth Health and Rehabilitation Center failed to give police crucial information that could have helped them have him recommitted.

By all accounts, Gennette walked away from the facility on April 29.

On the night of May 5, he returned to the center’s gate at 21820 Craggy View Street and asked to be let back in.

The staff refused.

They had held his bed open for 72 hours but released it to another patient when he failed to return in time, Ruiz said. Without the approval of his legal guardian, Gennette could not be readmitted, Ruiz said.

The staff called Peterson’s office but could not reach her because it was after hours, Ruiz said.

It was only later that the staff learned that they could have called a 24-hour hot line to the Ventura County Mental Health Department, which could have sent a team to pick up Gennette and usher him into psychiatric care until his residence at Chatsworth could be re-established, Ruiz said.

“They evidently called police because he wouldn’t go away,” said Detective Thomas Carr of the Police Department Detective Division’s Missing Persons Unit.

“The patrol officers responded out there, and they were told basically that he had been a patient there but . . . that he had been discharged and wasn’t allowed back in.”

Hospital staff failed to tell police that Gennette had been a patient there for eight years, or that he had a history of suicide attempts.

Police could not hold him or have him committed without any legal cause, such as evidence that Gennette could endanger himself or others, Carr said.

Gennette walked off again, this time for eight days.

His mother learned what happened and filed a missing persons report with police.

“There should be some holding room so he can be held until he can be transported, not turned away,” Arlene Gennette said. “That’s inhumane.”

She distributed thousands of flyers throughout the Valley, handing them out to police and hiring four men to tack them to telephone poles.

Days later, there was still no word from Bob Gennette.

Gennette says he remembers walking along the well-lighted streets of Hollywood, down Ventura Boulevard and Topanga Canyon Boulevard.

“I like walking, it’s good for you,” he said Wednesday. The interview was sprinkled with his opinions on Woodland Hills--”too expensive”--and the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius--”The Lord’s getting angry.”

He even remembers seeing a huge building smoldering somewhere in the San Fernando Valley during the riots that followed the Rodney G. King beating verdict.

Gennette’s long walk ended finally about 2 a.m. Tuesday in front of a 7-Eleven in Woodland Hills, where he had been asking passersby for money to get something to eat, Gennette said.

Los Angeles police officers from the West Valley station answered the call of a mentally disturbed person and arrested Gennette, taking him back to the Chatsworth Health and Rehabilitation Center.

Again, the staff refused to admit him.

“It would be against our policy,” Ruiz explained. The officers got permission from their supervisor to drive Gennette to Ventura to meet with his guardian, who then had him committed at the county’s inpatient unit.

“I certainly felt that something a little bit more could have been done than was done,” Carr said. “It wasn’t like they were dealing with an individual that they had little knowledge of, somebody who had been there only a couple of days. This person was a longtime resident.”

“The rules are crazy, and they’re for the protection of the client,” Peterson said. “But we don’t railroad people into psychiatric care.”