Mental patient’s escort delayed calling police

PORTLAND – A mental patient who fatally stabbed his girlfriend in 1988 was on a supervised visit in Portland last week when he locked his escort out of a care facility, talked for a time with his mother, walked out a back door and disappeared.

Portland police records show it took 45 minutes for the escort to call officers. Instead, they say, the escort called his supervisors in Salem twice.

The man, Christopher Walker, 46, was captured the next morning, Thanksgiving.

Walker was sentenced to the state hospital for killing 20-year-old Dena Saddler at a Portland transit mall after she filed a restraining order against him. He was in a drug-induced psychotic state.

The Oregonian newspaper reported that a state board in 1996 gave him a conditional release, but after he failed to report to his case manager, he tried to blow up a propane tank in Portland in 2003.

The Oregon State Hospital’s interim superintendent, Maynard Hammer, said his staff will review the decisions that allowed Christopher Walker to leave the Salem hospital with only one escort.

He said he didn’t know enough details yet to comment on the delay in calling police. He declined to comment about disciplinary action against the state employee escorting Walker.

Walker had attained a privilege level in June that allowed him a single escort from Salem to Portland to visit his mother, Hammer said. He was in a unit at the hospital that prepares patients to transition into the community.

“Our job for patients … is to treat them so they can live at a reduced level of care in a community. You really can’t do that without some levels of trust,” Hammer said. “When you have a case like this happen, it makes you wonder whether we’re dotting all the i’s and crossing all the t’s.”

Hammer also questioned the use of a single escort in any situation because of the potential for something to go wrong, including illness.