The mother of a man who shot seven people, killing four, in a 2001 rampage in Rifle says it’s in her son’s best interests to remain locked up at the state mental hospital for the rest of his life.
But it’s already too late for that.
Three years ago, Steven Michael Stagner began leaving the fenced and guarded grounds of the Colorado Mental Health Institute at Pueblo to go on camping trips and community excursions, much like grade-school field trips, accompanied only by unarmed hospital staff members — against the objections of Garfield County prosecutors.
The spree killer could, in a matter of a few years, be living in a neighborhood somewhere in Colorado.
A Denver Post review found that three-fifths of 41 killers determined “not guilty by reason of insanity” over the past 25 years in Colorado have been moved from the mental hospital into halfway houses and homes across the state, sometimes as soon as three years after their commitments.
An insanity acquittal in Colorado, as in other states across the country, means that killers are not responsible for their acts and therefore are not punished. They are held indefinitely until they no longer suffer an abnormal mental condition that is likely to cause them to be dangerous to themselves or others.
Unlike in the prison system, the time patients spend at the state hospital has little to do with the crimes they commit. In some cases, those accused of relatively minor crimes spend more years locked up at the hospital than those who commit multiple murders.
The insanity defense will be in the spotlight again this month as opening arguments in the Aurora theater shooting trial are set to begin April 27. Defendant James Holmes has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity in the 2012 murders of 12 people and the wounding of 70.
A Post review of files in criminal courts throughout Colorado found that:
• State mental patients sometimes earn off-grounds privileges like permission to attend college or work in less than two years. Patients who were released between July 1, 1995, and January 2014 had spent an average of only 4.9 years at the hospital. Patients originally accused of first-degree murder spent an average of 7.4 years at the hospital.
• Only one of the 41 killers has been arrested later for a felony offense. However, five had been treated at the hospital or other hospital psychiatric wards prior to killing someone.
• State hospital psychiatrists routinely seek to release patients many years earlier than judges and prosecutors deem them safe, and frequently despite troubling red flags.
Under the model of care practiced in Colorado, forensic patients accused of misdemeanors could be held longer than those who killed, according to CMHIP Superintendent Ron Hale.
He said some people who commit relatively minor offenses are sicker than those who do more violent acts. Every patient is treated with an individual plan that takes into account a complicated set of factors, including helping them deal with their own history of abuse.
“Risk is a really big factor,” Hale said. “We take the concept of community safety very seriously.”
Prosecutors and families of victims, however, often have voiced skepticism about the hospital’s decision-making as it affects community safety. They question the sometimes-rapid progress of mentally ill patients from locked hospital wards to limited or unfettered freedom, court records show.
The prospect of releasing Robert Dunn from the mental hospital sent shock waves through Manitou Springs, where a few years earlier on June 28, 2000, he stabbed his 7-year-old daughter, Aaren, believing she was possessed. After she yelled, “Daddy, Daddy, you’re killing me!” he slashed her throat from ear to ear and tried to pry her head off with a crowbar. Dunn was committed that December.
Hospital psychiatrists began seeking off-grounds privileges for Dunn in 2003, less than three years later. In 2004, when a second request was made and publicized, school teachers wrote letters opposing the move. One had counseled Aaren Dunn’s best friend.
“The thought of his being released scares her beyond belief. At one time, Mr. Dunn had threatened the best friend for having called 911 one time when he was beating his daughter,” one counselor wrote.
“It seems ludicrous to be worried about Mr. Dunn’s social skills after the brutality of killing his own daughter,” another counselor wrote.
El Paso County District Judge Larry Schwartz consistently denied such requests at first.
“The experts cannot preclude the very probable result that a similar state could once again occur,” the judge wrote in 2007, denying the first request to move Dunn out of CMHIP. Eight months later, Dunn had a “severe psychotic episode.” Terrified of the devil, he was suicidal.
Years later, the hospital sought court approval to let Dunn fly to Hawaii. Prosecutors opposed the trip, “fraught with danger,” because it called for “peers” ensuring that Dunn took medications. Schwartz approved the trip, based on the hospital’s safety plan. He let Dunn move into a halfway house in 2011 and into an apartment in 2014.
Deputy District Attorney Brien Cecil fought the moves, revealing that Dunn had been treated in psychiatric hospitals four times before he killed his daughter.
Hale declined to discuss Dunn, saying he could not comment about individual patients because of confidentiality rules. Generally speaking, he said, when patients are released, they must abide by rigorous rules. Assistant Superintendent Birgit Fisher said if anything, hospital psychiatrists and clinicians err on the side of caution and are very conservative when considering increased freedoms for patients.
Dunn must attend group therapy, keep a daily diary and take blood and urine tests to ensure he is taking medications and not drinking alcohol. A case manager checks up on him randomly, doing apartment searches for weapons and drugs, court records indicate.
Fisher said the hospital has had hundreds of success stories — mentally ill people whose lives have been completely transformed.
Miraculous change
Zachary Floyd, like most other hospital patients found not guilty of murder by reason of insanity since 1990, has not been charged with any crime since his commitment to the hospital.
“They saved my life,” Floyd said of state hospital staff members, generally, and Dr. Elissa Ball, one of his psychiatrists, in particular.
On April 27, 1995, Floyd, then 39, beat 27-year-old Keith Welden to death with a golf club in a manic state, believing the man was the devil, he said.
When he went to the state hospital, the medication Risperdal quelled his hallucinations and mania, he said. Layers of treatment and programming, including anger management classes and vocational and college training, steered his life on the right course.
“I’m not surprised at all,” he said when told nearly all of his fellow patients had not been arrested for serious crimes after their hospital stays.
After his release in 2006, he married and earned a degree in engineering at Colorado State University’s Pueblo campus. He also taught mathematics at Pueblo Community College.
“It’s nothing short of a miracle,” he said.
Although patients who have killed almost universally have stayed crime-free, five previously had been committed at the state hospital or other hospital psychiatric wards for violent offenses or making threats before their releases and subsequent arrests for first-degree murder.
David Lynn Cooper first went to the state hospital more than 20 years ago after he slashed his father and brother in the face with a pocketknife in Westminster.
He went to the state hospital Aug. 26, 1992, diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder, and on March 11, 1996, he was released from hospital supervision.
On July 19, 1996, Cooper sexually assaulted and fatally stabbed his 10-year-old daughter, Renee Cooper, at his Wheat Ridge home. In 2004, Cooper was charged with a felony count of assault on a guard.
Shooting spree in Rifle
Prosecutors across Colorado have complained about what they consider a paucity of information about patients with very dangerous backgrounds.
Five years after Stagner wielded a .38-caliber revolver and went on a shooting spree in Rifle, the hospital sought off-grounds privileges for the then 47-year-old schizophrenic man.
Myrtle Stagner had tried for 20 years to get help for her son, who had been in and out of hospital mental wards getting therapy once a year, on average, after making violent threats, including against President Bill Clinton in 1995. After he left the Army in 1981, he believed he was an “avenging” Michael the Archangel.
When he was on his medication, he had the sweetest personality and was kind to children, his mother said. But off medications, he was a completely different person. Shortly after Steven Stagner had been treated at the Grand Junction Veterans Administration hospital, he stopped taking his pills.
The shootings began July 3, 2001, near a grocery store in Rifle. It was late Tuesday morning.
Stagner fatally shot Juan Carlos Medrano Velasquez, 22, and Anjelica Toscono, 19, as they talked to relatives in Mexico on pay phones outside a grocery store. He strolled to the entrance of the RV Park and fatally shot Juan Hernandez, 44, and Fernando Velasquez, 23, in the head. He walked to a section of the park occupied mostly by Hispanics and shot and wounded Rudolfo Beltran, 30, Efrin Marimontes-Ortega, 18, and Medel Ortega-Venzor, 25.
Deputy District Attorney Scott Turner said the hospital’s request for off-grounds privileges came with scant information about its safety plan.
“It was lacking in details,” Turner said. “The objection we filed certainly cited his history of mental illness. Our office objected to it.”
District Judge Denise Lynch denied Stagner’s request for privileges in 2006. But in 2012, Judge T. Peter Craven approved the privileges.
Stagner remains housed at the state hospital.
Personal perspective
Helen Hand said she won’t second-guess those who decide when it is safe to release mentally ill people who kill. Hand, a clinical psychologist who has treated thousands of mentally ill people, said she knows how difficult it is to predict human nature.
But her deference to psychiatrists doesn’t mean she isn’t deeply concerned about the choices they make. Denver teen Amber Torrez killed Hand’s brother, John, 55, the founder and president of the Aurora adult-learning Colorado Free University on March 28, 2004. Torrez stabbed Hand 30 times in his Hilltop home and the next day stabbed cab driver Masfin Gezahgn 39 times.
State hospital staff members will conscientiously make decisions with safety being a paramount factor, Hand said. But she also sees shortcomings.
“We don’t have the tools or ability to predict future behavior,” Hand said. “(Psychiatry) is not a science that is 100 percent locked down.”
A certain amount of backsliding is anticipated and even built in to CMHIP’s programming.
When patients test positive for illegal drug use or escape, they are returned to the state hospital, Fisher said.
When Torrez recently was given off-grounds privileges, Hand, who took over for her brother running his college, was notified. Hand said she has empathy for Torrez and fully believes the 19-year-old woman’s mental condition is what triggered her brother’s horrible death. But that doesn’t ease her apprehensions.
“I wouldn’t want to meet her on the street,” Hand said.
Kirk Mitchell: 303-954-1206, denverpost.com/coldcases or twitter.com/kirkmitchell