Sloppy security blamed in escape of 4 sex offenders

"MN Agencies"

05/16/2006

Probe calls St. Peter breakout preventable; union says 4 workers, manager are fired

BY RACHEL E. STASSEN-BERGER
Pioneer Press

Workers at the state hospital that houses Minnesota’s most-dangerous sex offenders had a pervasive complacency about security before last month’s escape of four patients, a human services agency commissioner said Monday.

According to department officials, the St. Peter hospital workers:

• Didn’t follow up when they had heard patients — including Michael Dale Benson, a 42-year-old rapist, who escaped with three others in April — discuss an escape in late December.

• Failed to notice patients’ two or three weeks of work prying open metal window bars.

• Shut down electronic monitoring systems the night of the escape.

• Didn’t carefully check mail or patients as they were leaving the shop unit, allowing patients to obtain saw blades and c-clamps.

“Had the policies and procedures been followed, the escape would likely have been discovered and thwarted,” a summary of the investigation said.

As a result, the agency fired four staff members and a manager, a union official said.

Assistant Human Services Commissioner Wes Kooistra declined to specify how many hospital staffers were disciplined or what type of discipline they received. But he said employees were fired, suspended and disciplined in other ways.

“Complacency toward security seemed to be pervasive through that whole unit,” Kooistra said of the St. Peter Minnesota Security Hospital’s south unit, from which Benson and three other sex offenders escaped.

The complacency seemed to be limited to that one unit, he said. But Kooistra said department officials plan to improve the entire system to make sure similar problems cannot happen again.

“If it can happen in one unit, you have to believe it can happen in another unit,” he said.

Department officials have increased or will increase the number of staffers, security checks and programs for patients. They are considering other changes, too.

But that’s not enough for Rep. Ruth Johnson, DFL, St. Peter.

“It’s clear from today’s report that a breakdown of vigilance and supervision allowed the escape of four very dangerous persons. While strong corrective action at the Minnesota Sex Offender Program has already been taken, it’s clear that more needs to be done,” she said.

Jennifer Lovaasen, spokeswoman of the union that represents five of the disciplined employees, said four employees and a manager were fired, an employee and a manager were suspended for 11 days, and another employee was verbally reprimanded.

She said the five union employees have appealed their discipline and “have a good case.” She did not elaborate because the appeal is pending.

Benson was apprehended this month in Kansas City, Mo., two weeks after his escape. His three fellow escapees were caught within hours.

Benson was in the St. Peter state hospital because, like more than 300 other men in Minnesota, he is considered too sexually psychopathic to be among the general public. Like many of the men civilly committed to Minnesota’s Sex Offender Program, Benson already had served time in prison for his sexual crimes.

On April 15, he and the three others escaped by prying a bar off a security window in one of the patients’ rooms. They broke out security glass and lowered themselves to the ground using a rope made of a belt and bed sheets.

Kooistra said unit staffers are supposed to check the security of the ward’s windows during their shifts. However, he said, they didn’t.

“If those window checks had been done according to protocol, we wouldn’t be here talking about this today,” Kooistra said.

Staffers were supposed to fill out reports confirming the window checks but often filled out them out at the beginning of their shifts, claiming to have completed the work before it was done.

Exterior motion detectors and cameras should have alerted hospital staff of the escape. But the alarms had been turned off.

“A staff member shut off all 16 cameras that night. That was a practice, we determined, that happened quite frequently,” said Jack Erskine, acting deputy director for the Human Services department and lead investigator of the audit.

Kooistra said it was windy the night of the escape and the wind set off the alarms, causing staffers to turn the system off. The monitoring system is at least a decade old and often had false positives, officials said.

Also on the night of the escape, staffers from another unit alerted Benson’s unit staff of suspicious activity they saw.

“To our knowledge nothing was done in response to the alert,” said Kooistra.

Unit staffers also failed to use a metal detecting wand on patients when they left the hospital’s shop area and failed to check patients’ mail for contraband.

As a result, patients managed to get saw blades mailed into the unit hidden in a boot’s heel and secreted two c-clamps out of the shop unit. Benson had been caught with one c-clamp — and was punished for possession of that tool — but used a second c-clamp to fasten the makeshift escape rope to the building.

In the area from which Benson escaped, Kooistra said, staffers tended to stay in their security office rather than walking in the patient area — even though they were told to do so as recently as the day before the escape.

“It is our belief that had staff been on the floor they would have been alerted to the window being broken, regardless of the blankets and pillows used to muffle the noise,” he said.

Jim Monroe of the Minnesota Association of Professional Employees said he is concerned about the safety of the security hospital — not because of staff complacency but because the state has not provided employees enough training to do their jobs well.

“I’m really concerned that someone is going to get hurt there or worse,” said Monroe, who said he has not heard of any of his union’s employees being disciplined because of the escape. But, he said, the problems at the hospital go beyond just staff problems.