Psychiatric patient charged in fellow patient's killing in St. Peter

A psychiatric patient has been charged with bludgeoning his roommate to death with a guitar and choking an employee at a state-operated mental health facility in St. Peter, Minn., on New Year's Day.

The suspect, David Michael Otey, 43, was charged on Tuesday. He now faces two counts of second-degree murder and three felony counts of first-, second- and fourth-degree assault.

St. Peter police officers responded a little after 1 a.m. Monday to a disturbance at the North Campus of the Forensic Mental Health Program, formerly known as the Minnesota Security Hospital, according to a criminal complaint filed Tuesday in Nicollet County District Court.

The facility is operated by the Department of Human Services (DHS), and primarily serves patients who are civilly committed as mentally ill and dangerous.

Hospital workers told police they locked themselves in an office while Otey was in the nearby hallway, according to the complaint.

Police spoke with Otey to calm him down before he agreed to be put in handcuffs, the charges say. The officers found an ambulance crew was already there providing lifesaving measures to a man with trauma to his head and face, and "significant blood pooling" around his head.

The man was taken to a hospital and pronounced dead around 2:30 a.m., charges say.

Investigators believe Otey and the victim lived in the same room.

The officers found a damaged electric guitar with blood on it on Otey's side of the room and pieces of broken wood on the victim's bed, according to the charges. The state has not released the name of the victim.

A hospital employee told police that Otey put her in a chokehold after he allegedly confessed to hitting the roommate with a guitar. She said other employees intervened to stop the chokehold before locking themselves in the office to get away, the charges allege.

Human Services Commissioner Jodi Harpstead said in a statement the incident has "left our patients and staff badly shaken."

"Our thoughts now are with the victim's family and friends who have suffered a terrible loss," Harpstead said, noting that DHS has started an internal review.

No attorney information was available for Otey on the case page on Wednesday. He had filed an application for a public defender.

Otey was lodged at the St. Peter facility in 2019 following a case in which he stabbed his sister to death at a senior living center where she worked in Crow Wing County. Otey and his sister were preparing food in the kitchen when he killed her with a knife, charges say.

He was found not guilty due to mental illness but was referred to be civilly committed, records show.

After he was arrested for the killing in 2018, Otey told police he "was thinking about killing other individuals," according to the charges.

The facility in St. Peter has a long, troubled history.

It was placed on "conditional status" in 2011 because staff were overusing restraints and seclusion. A couple of years later, a legislative auditor's report outlined chronic management and safety failures as the number of assaults on staff and residents climbed.

Then in 2014, a patient died of head trauma after another man in the facility punched him and stomped on his head. State investigators who looked into that killing found the man was likely lying on the floor for 1½ hours before staff found him.

OSHA fined DHS for failing to protect workers at the psychiatric hospital in 2015. That year, then-Gov. Mark Dayton brought stakeholders together to try to address issues at the facility. An analysis at that time said the shift from a punitive to a treatment-based approach at the facility had been hindered by a lack of professional staff and insufficient training to address violent behavior, leading to serious patient and staff injuries.

The hospital's conditional license restriction was lifted in 2016, after officials made a number of reforms, including training staff on how to identify and respond to potentially violent situations by restraining or secluding people.

Nonetheless, over the past four years, the facility has been the subject of about two dozen maltreatment investigations, according to DHS documents. In a half-dozen cases, investigators found substantiated neglect or sexual abuse of a vulnerable person. The majority of the investigations were inconclusive, and a few allegations were found to be false.

The state also has issued five correction orders for the facility in recent years, for violations of standards that did not rise to the level of posing an imminent risk to patients' health, safety or rights.

The latest was for failure to monitor implementation of policies and procedures, stemming from an April 2023 incident where staff did not have a sufficient number of handcuffs and were not trained to use zip ties.

The most recent fatal attack at a DHS-operated facility was in February 2020, when a resident of a DHS-operated group home in West St. Paul fatally stabbed another resident, according to a DHS spokesperson.

Otey is being held at the Nicollet County jail. His next court hearing is set for Jan. 16.