Nev. mental health patients bused and crimes followed
By Cynthia Hubert and Phillip Reese, Sacramento Bee
Six months after he was discharged to a Greyhound bus and shipped out of Las Vegas, one former patient of Nevada’s primary hospital for mentally ill people stabbed a man to death in Iowa.
Another former patient, responding to voices in his head, set off explosions in a grocery store and a doughnut shop in Tennessee just a month after Rawson-Neal Psychiatric Hospital in Las Vegas gave him a one-way ticket to Knoxville in July 2012.
Nevada bused yet another Rawson-Neal patient, a convicted child molester, to San Diego in 2011, even as he faced criminal charges in Las Vegas for failing to register as a sex offender. He also failed to register in San Diego, where he disappeared into the streets and soon became the target of a citywide manhunt.
Yet another former Rawson-Neal patient was found dead, his body floating in the American River near a homeless camp, seven months after he received a Greyhound ticket to Sacramento courtesy of the state of Nevada.
Even as Nevada’s embattled state mental hospital works to revamp operations, the fallout from its aggressive busing policies continues to resonate from California to Florida.