Doctor Had Prior Run-In With Police

A former physician trainee at Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center barricaded himself in an unused patient room at the hospital in February with the deaf-mute man he is now suspected of killing, Los Angeles County officials said Monday.

After being forced by county police to open the door, Dr. Warren C. Lemons said that he was a physician at the public hospital and that his companion, MacArthur Townsend, was his son. Lemons showed police his identification badge from his stint as a King/Drew resident from 1999 to 2001.

When police entered the room, they saw Townsend zipping up his pants and found videotaping equipment aimed at a bed, officials said Monday. They also found soft restraints, said Chief Margaret York, who heads the county office of public safety. But neither man was arrested because no crime was believed to have occurred, York said.

Two months later, Lemons, 39, was arrested on suspicion of murdering Townsend, 22, during a sexual encounter in a Calexico hotel room. Lemons admitted to police that he may have over-medicated Townsend with powerful sedatives.

Monday’s disclosures add to a burgeoning scandal at King/Drew, where two Los Angeles County supervisors have demanded an investigation into a series of security breaches involving Lemons.

Lemons had met and treated Townsend at King/Drew during a family medicine training program, from which he was fired nearly three years ago. County officials recently confirmed that Lemons was able to return to the hospital at least twice this year, gaining access to the vacant room and retrieving Townsend’s medical file without apparent authorization.

Meanwhile, law enforcement and county health officials also are looking into whether any of 140 videotapes found in Lemon’s possession in Calexico -- some showing nude young men posed at Lemon’s direction -- were filmed at King/Drew.

King/Drew officials will travel to Calexico today to review the tapes.

Although police say Lemons is their lead suspect, he has not yet been charged in Townsend’s death and is not in custody. Lemons’ attorney said last week that he would be exonerated.

York said that county police, who have a station at King/Drew, were called to the fourth floor of the hospital around 10:20 p.m. on Feb. 8 after someone spotted two suspicious men in a then-closed ward known as 4B.

Lemons and Townsend had barricaded the door of a patient room with a bed, but opened the door when a police sergeant instructed them to, York said. Townsend was zipping up his pants, she said.

Besides the video camera, police found three unopened 90-minute tapes, four soft restraints out of their wrapping and a bottle of baby oil inside an open duffel bag, according to a memo written by the sergeant, David Johnson, after the incident.

Johnson called the nurse in charge, who was unable to determine if Lemons was on staff after calling several staff doctors, including the supervisor of the family medicine residency program, according to the memo. The nurse said she was told by the supervisor that Lemons should be allowed to leave and the matter would be taken care of in the morning, the memo said. Two days later, Johnson learned from the nurse that Lemons was no longer a King/Drew doctor trainee, police said.

York said Johnson found the incident odd and wrote a memo to his captain about it.

“It’s unusual certainly to have a video camera, and they did have restraints in the room,” York said. “Neither of them were in use, but it was unusual.”

But York said her officers had no reason to detain Lemons. “There was nothing criminal for them to arrest them for or to charge them with,” she said.

Health department spokesman John Wallace said it is “law enforcement’s job, not the health department’s” to decide whether to detain suspects. But he said the incident is now under review by his department.

“We really want to get to the bottom of it and understand what happened and what we can put in place to ensure that this doesn’t happen again,” Wallace said.

King/Drew’s oversight of Lemons has come under question from a different quarter as well.

Two former faculty members said that Lemons exhibited odd behavior during his stint at King/Drew, and documents obtained by The Times show he had serious academic deficiencies before being admitted to the family medicine training program.

He was forced to leave King/Drew in 2001 after he did not obtain his state medical license in the required 24 months.

Biatriz Zamudio, a former psychologist in the family medicine department, said in an interview that she had told the residency director in November 1999 that Lemons displayed “odd, defensive, regimented, distant behavior.” She said she based her recollection on an entry in her work calendar at the time.

She said she asked to see his personnel file, but was turned down.

“Had they allowed me to [see the file], maybe I might have been able to impress upon them that there was a problem and maybe this whole thing could have been prevented,” said Zamudio.

Zamudio was terminated in 2001 for allegedly closing a door on a medical student’s leg. She denied the allegation, saying her dismissal was in retaliation for raising concerns about the family medicine program.

Some of those concerns about the overall operation of the program were later validated by a national accrediting body.

Another former faculty member, Pat Matthews-Juarez, said she remembered hearing complaints about Lemons’ odd behavior from Zamudio and at least two other faculty members and believed they should have been investigated.

“They were complaints that as a responsible person you would act on them,” said Matthews-Juarez, now associate dean for faculty affairs and development at Meharry Medical College in Nashville.

Documents obtained by The Times show that Lemons had academic problems before being accepted into the family practice residency at King/Drew in 1999. For instance, he was forced to repeat the first year of a pediatrics training program at Pitt County Memorial Hospital in Greenville, N.C.

In a letter to King/Drew, the director of that residency program wrote that Lemons had “difficulty in processing information and prioritization of patient concerns.”

“Warren is a very bright young man who would seem to become bogged with minutiae and miss the obvious problems concerning his patients,” wrote Dr. Samuel Parrish Jr., who has since left the institution.

In addition, records from Lemons’ medical school, Texas A&M; University College of Medicine, show that he was ranked in the lower half of his class of 46 students, with a grade point average of 2.31.

Matthews-Juarez said she was worried that Lemons’ case would have a negative effect on King/Drew, a facility she said was vital for a community with tremendous healthcare needs. The hospital, which serves a largely impoverished and minority population, already is reeling from other scandals and sanctions in recent months.

“My heart bleeds for [Townsend’s] family,” said Matthews-Juarez. “My heart bleeds for the community. My heart bleeds for that department and it certainly bleeds for Dr. Lemons because he really should not have been allowed to enter our program.”