Rochester Hospital Released Daniel Prude Hours Before Fatal Encounter With Police (CW: Suicide and Violence)

Rochester Hospital Released Daniel Prude Hours Before Fatal Encounter With Police (CW: Suicide and Violence)

Posted on September 29, 2020

Daniel Prude’s family knew he needed psychiatric care and tried to get it for him. When Joe Prude called the police to report his brother missing, he was struggling to understand why Daniel Prude had been released from the hospital hours earlier. Less attention has been paid to what happened to Daniel Prude in the preceding hours, when he was treated and released after a psychiatric assessment at Strong Memorial Hospital. Medical decisions in a case like Daniel Prude's are high-stakes, with little margin for error, says Dr. Ken Duckworth, CMO of NAMI. "Emergency psychiatric assessment is very challenging, and the potential for catastrophic outcomes following your decision is very real," he says. Prude's case is unusual because the consequences of doctors' decision to release him have played out so publicly, says NAMI's Duckworth. "You make a very big decision, which usually has no known outcome. You put this person in the hospital, you go on to the next patient. You send this person home, you go on to the next patient," he explains. Duckworth adds that he would not second-guess the actions of Prude's hospital team in the moment, but with the benefit of hindsight, "there's overwhelming evidence that he had a psychotic illness and was quite vulnerable," he says. "He didn't need to die."