A social worker who was stabbed while on the job at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital died Saturday, police said.
The attack occurred at 1:39 p.m. Thursday, Dec. 4, in a hallway in the hospital’s Ward 86, according to the San Francisco County Sheriff’s Office, which is responsible for security at the hospital.
The victim was reportedly stabbed with a 5-inch kitchen knife and was taken to an operating room in critical condition with wounds to the neck and shoulder. The San Francisco Department of Public Health has not released his name, but colleagues and friends at a memorial gathering over the weekend identified him as Alberto Rangel, 51.
The suspect — Wilfredo Tortolero Arriechi, 34, of San Francisco — was taken into custody at the hospital and was booked into San Francisco County Jail on suspicion of charges including attempted murder, police said. A homicide charge was expected to be added.
The attacker was said to be a patient. Ward 86 is the location of the HIV clinic at the hospital’s main campus.
Hospital staff had raised safety concerns and requested a sheriff’s deputy be stationed in Ward 86 after a doctor received threats from a patient, the San Francisco Deputy Sheriffs’ Association said in a statement Saturday. The deputy was in a nearby room when the attack occurred in the hallway.
“This was not a random, unforeseeable incident,” deputies’ union President Ken Lomba said in the statement, which criticized the public health department’s shift to a “response-only” security model. “Deputies, nurses and social workers told DPH that pulling deputies off high-risk units/posts and replacing them with unarmed cadets and distant response teams would get someone seriously hurt or killed. On Dec. 4, that prediction came true.”
The union urged the Department of Public Health to restore and increase deputy sheriff positions on high-risk units, in behavioral-health settings, vehicle/foot patrol and in HIV/positive-health clinics, Lomba said.
Bay City News Service contributed to this report.
