Over two weeks since the death of Alberto Rangel, a social worker at San Francisco General Hospital’s Ward 86, an outpatient HIV/AIDS clinic, staff and patients are left questioning what could have been done to prevent his killing.
Rangel was stabbed repeatedly by a patient who had been reported to hospital security for abusive behavior and threats made toward a doctor two weeks prior to the attack. There were plans in place to ban that patient, Wilfredo Totolero Arriechi, from the ward.
In the days following the attack, the sheriff’s department issued a statement saying that a deputy intervened “without hesitation.” The sheriff’s union subsequently issued its own statement, writing that the deputy was “close enough” to “rapidly … intervene within seconds.” The deputy, the union’s statement read, prevented a “mass-casualty stabbing.”…