Four psychiatric and addiction patients with a judicial past went missing in four days
Four psychiatric and substance abuse patients with a history of assault or threats went missing from their hospitals in Nova Scotia in the past week, including three in one day.
One person was missing from Valley Regional Hospital on Saturday and three from Nova Scotia Hospital of East Coast Forensic hospitals in Dartmouth on Tuesday.
Just before 2 p.m. Saturday, 45-year-old David Charles Zinck was reported missing from Valley Regional, but was back after 10 p.m. that evening after RCMP located him in Morden, Kings County, Cpl. said Chris Marshall.
At 2:30 p.m. Tuesday, Nova Scotia Health issued a press release saying that 45-year-old Candace E. Millen was missing from a hospital in Dartmouth.
Then, at 3:48 p.m., 26-year-old Brittany Jordan Panisiak went missing from a Dartmouth hospital, and 15 minutes later, 30-year-old Ryan Joseph Trentleman also went missing from a Dartmouth hospital.
In two of the releases, NSH said the patient’s risk to themselves and others increases the longer they are away from treatment.
Provincial court records indicate that all four have been in court in the past on charges of assault, making threats, or both.
In an email response, Nova Scotia Health said it would not say how many of the individuals were from each of the Dartmouth hospitals due to privacy concerns.
“The only time we share information is when a patient goes missing and the risk to safety (both theirs and the public) outweighs a breach of an individual’s privacy.”
The fact that three people were reported missing in Dartmouth was accidental and there was no coordination between them, the statement said.
Panisiak has since returned to the Dartmouth facility, but how that happened is unknown.
NSH also cited privacy by not disclosing how many of the patients were in hospitals voluntarily or involuntarily, or as a result of a court order for an assessment or an indication that they were not criminally responsible for a past crime.
It also wouldn’t tell if any of them had the privilege of being off site, supervised or not, or if they were missing because they didn’t return from an unsupervised leave, slipped away from the person with them on a leave under surveillance or somehow escaped from the facility.
“Under the mandate of the Criminal Code Review Board, so-called ‘privilege caps’ are awarded and an individual advances based on their improvement within the hospital,” the statement said.
“Clients/patients are given a level of privilege through a rigorous review process. This process may include day passes for access to community work and/or rehabilitation programs. During each access to the community there is a process to check compliance. Conditions and measures are in place to report any violation of those privileges, and appropriate action is taken when violations occur.”
When asked how people with histories of attacks and threats are being monitored and whether a review will be done to ensure that there are improved systems and processes in place to try and prevent similar incidents of missing patients, NSH replied that “patient histories are a of many factors is when to determine risk.”
Last October, a man found not criminally responsible on attempted murder charges for a knife attack on his sleeping father also walked out of the forensic hospital.
The number of incidents of patients in the mental health and addictions program considered missing in fiscal year 2022-23 was 208, NSH statistics show. That was less than 222 in the previous year period. There were 158 in 2020-21, 328 in 2019-20 and 245 in 2018-19.
