The Oregon State Hospital on May 28, 2021. (Amanda Loman/Salem Reporter)
A contracted worker at Oregon State Hospital last month punched a patient who moments before had hurled racist slurs at the staffer.
Erik Banks, the contracted mental health technician, was “removed from our facility and instructed not to return,” a March 25 email from a state hospital manager said, “due to an incident in which he was witnessed to assault a patient by punching them in the face 3 times.”
The incident, first reported by the Lund Report, is detailed in records obtained by Salem Reporter Tuesday. It is the latest incident of violence at the hospital which has struggled for the past year to maintain adequate staffing and respond to a more seriously ill patient population.
Banks was previously a temporary healthcare provider at Colorado-based Jogan Health, which has contracted with the hospital since September 2021 to help fill a staffing shortage.
Ralph Loos, Jogan Health spokesman, said Tuesday that Banks was no longer employed at or contracted with the company.
Jogan currently has 30 contracted employees working at the state hospital, where Banks worked from Jan. 10 to March 25.
According to state hospital incident reports obtained by Salem Reporter through a public records request, a contracted staffer – whose name is redacted in the reports – was in a kitchenette at the hospital on March 23 getting tea for a patient while another patient was in the doorway. The staffer said, “Excuse me” and walked past the patient.
The patient told the staffer they had bumped into him, to which the staffer said they did not, according to a report by a National Guard member who witnessed the incident. The patient then twice called the staffer a racist slur used to refer to Black people and threatened to throw his salad at the staffer, the report said.
“You aren’t’ going to do that. Don’t do it. You won’t do it,” the staffer said, according to the report. A National Guard member tried to verbally de-escalate the situation, “which was unsuccessful.”
The patient again called the staffer the slur, leaned in and threw the salad at them. The Guard member prevented the salad from hitting the staffer and it “opened onto the kitchenette floor,” the report said.
Details of what happened next varies in the three incident reports provided by the health authority.
A mental health technician wrote in their report that “salad got thrown” as the patient “went to throw a punch and they started fighting.”
In another report, the Guard member wrote that the staffer then lunged toward the patient and hit him with a closed fist three times on the right side of his mouth and jaw area. The Guard member tried to get in between the two, and the patient ducked his head and turned away, the report said.
As the patient was ducking and the Guard member was trying to guard the patient, the staffer reached over the Guard member with two fists to hit the patient in the back of the head and upper back multiple times. Staff called a Code Green, used to indicate a behavioral emergency.
Staff opened the door and pulled the staffer out and into the nurses’ station. The patient followed the staffer, but registered nurses stopped and assessed him. According to the report, they found “small amounts of blood around his teeth and redness on his face that was warm to the touch.”
The patient refused any pain medication or ice. He “continued to yell profanity” at the staffer, called him the slur again three times, threatened to spit in the staffer’s mouth and said the staffer was going to “get fired and go to jail.”
The patient “was redirected from the area and asked not to use racial slurs in the milieu but continued to do so. Eventually he was able to de-escalate in the TV room with select staff,” the report said. The staffer was escorted safely off the unit.
The staffer, in their own incident report, said the patient “threw his dinner at me and proceeded to attack me. I was in fear for my life because this is my first time working with the criminally insane. I didn’t know what he was capable of so I defended myself.”
In response to a request from Salem Reporter, the Oregon Health Authority provided an email identifying Banks as the contracted employee barred from the hospital for hitting a patient multiple times.
Cpt. Stephanie Bigman, Oregon State Police spokeswoman, said Tuesday that the agency was investigating the incident. She did not respond to a question about whether Banks had been cited, arrested or charged.
A search of state court records did not show Banks had been charged, and the Marion County Jail’s roster Tuesday did not list him as being in custody.
Contact reporter Ardeshir Tabrizian: [email protected] or 503-929-3053.
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Ardeshir Tabrizian has covered criminal justice and housing for Salem Reporter since September 2021. As an Oregon native, his award-winning watchdog journalism has traversed the state. He has done reporting for The Oregonian, Eugene Weekly and Malheur Enterprise.
