The accused stabber in last month’s fatal attack on a UCSF social worker at SF General Hospital finally had a court appearance Tuesday, pleading not guilty, with his attorney saying “he was suffering a mental health crisis that day.”
We’re just now beginning legal proceedings in the case of the UCSF social worker who was stabbed and killed at SF General Hospital at the hospital’s HIV Ward 86 on December 4. That 51-year-old social worker Alberto Rangel died three days later, and the accused stabber, 34-year-old Wilfredo Tortolero-Arriechi, has been charged with murder. The whole tragedy has set off a separate controversy about safety at the hospital, particularly with regards to the suspect Tortolero-Arriechi, who had been seemingly stalking a certain other doctor (not the victim Alberto Rangel) at another medical facility earlier in the day, and who happened to bring a five-inch kitchen knife to the hospital.
The suspect Tortolero-Arriechi had not yet been arraigned, and oddly, was detained in the very hospital where the alleged crime happened, because SF General Hospital is where the SF County Jail psych ward is. But the arraignment finally did begin Tuesday, and the Chronicle reports that Tortolero-Arriechi pleaded not guilty to murder.
“It’s obviously clear that he was suffering a mental health crisis that day,” Tortolero-Arriechi’s attorney, SF deputy public defender Sylvia Nguyen told Mission Local. “It was almost three weeks before he was even stabilized enough to be able to come to court.”
As previously mentioned, Tortolero-Arriechi had seemed to develop an unusual fixation on another doctor who worked in Ward 86. A December 16 report in the Chronicle detailed how for weeks, Ward 86 staffers had been complaining that an “angry and delusional patient was targeting a doctor on their floor,” that patient being Tortolero-Arriechi. Tortolero-Arriechi had reportedly confronted that doctor at a different clinic, the San Francisco City Clinic, earlier on the day of the stabbing.
According to SFPD and sheriff’s deputies, Tortolero-Arriechi then proceeded to that doctor’s next shift at Ward 86, and was able to enter that premises with a knife. He began shouting for the doctor, Rangel tried to calm him down, and Rangel was then fatally stabbed in the neck and shoulder.
SF General Hospital staffers have brought up concerns about safety on-site, but per Mission Local, they’ve reportedly been told to stop talking to the press.
Image: Exterior view of Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center building - San Francisco, California, USA - May 26, 2024 (Getty Images)
