10-28-2011 Maryland:40-year-old had been accused of molestation in 2010
A man accused of second-degree rape for molesting an 11-year-old girl in Montgomery County was killed Thursday evening by a fellow resident at a state mental health hospital in Jessup, officials said.
Rogelio Mondragon, 40, was a patient at the Clifton T. Perkins Hospital in Jessup. In December 2010, he was found incompetent to stand trial on a rape charge and was committed to the hospital. On Thursday, he was in Montgomery County Circuit Court for a competency hearing about 10 a.m. and he was ordered back to the hospital for continued treatment.
Hours after he returned to the hospital, about 7:30 p.m., Maryland State Police were called to his room, where Mondragon’s body was found by hospital staff, police said.
He was pronounced dead at the scene. His body has been taken to the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Baltimore for an autopsy.
Maryland State Police say Andre Mayo, 46, who also is a patient at the hospital, killed Mondragon. Mayo is charged with first- and second-degree murder for Mondragon’s death. It was not immediately clear why Mayo was admitted to the institution.
It is the second time in eight days and the third time in 13 months that one patient at the facility has killed another.
All three killings involved Montgomery County patients.
On Oct. 21, 24-year-old Vitaly Davydov, of North Potomac, was arrested on the suspicion that he killed his roommate, David Rico-Noyola, 22, of Anne Arundel County. In 2007, Davydov pleaded guilty to the first-degree murder of Bethesda psychiatrist Wayne S. Fenton in North Bethesda. He has been hospitalized since.
On Sept. 26, 2010, 51-year-old El Soundani El-Wahhabi, of Baltimore, was arrested for the first-degree murder of Susan Sachs, 45, of Chevy Chase, a fellow patient. Sachs was found face-down on her bed, strangled to death. Sachs was hospitalized at Perkins after being found not competent to stand trial for the 2004 beating death of psychiatrist Joyce Hadl, 71, of Chevy Chase. Hadl was Sachs’ landlord at the time of her death.
“The events at the Clifton T. Perkins Hospital over the last week are tragic and unacceptable,” Maryland Department of Mental Health and Hygiene Secretary Dr. Joshua M. Sharfstein said in a written statement Friday. “Hospitals are places for healing, not violence. Perkins Hospital has taken many steps to strengthen the safety of its environment, but more needs to be done.”
Sharfstein held a meeting in Baltimore on Friday to discuss ways to improve patient and staff safety.
Police said Mayo approached a hospital security staff member and gave details of the assault on Mondragon while other hospital employees were moving patients off the floor for the investigation. Video surveillance tapes show Mayo entering the victim’s room on two occasions within a half hour.
Police investigators were at the hospital throughout the night conducting interviews and reviewing evidence.
A motive for the homicide has not been established, police said. ..Source.. by Danielle E. Gaines, Staff Writer
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