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A violent psychopath is on the loose in California after escaping a Hawaii mental facility

If you come across a middle-aged man in the San Francisco Bay Area with a black jacket, aloha shirt, and fresh-off-the-islands tan, you should turn and walk away. He might be a violent, psychopathic necrophiliac who escaped a mental hospital in Hawaii on Sunday and flew to California.

Randall Saito, a 59-year-old who murdered a young woman but avoided prison by pleading insanity, slipped out a state psychiatric hospital in Honolulu on Sunday and flew to San Jose, California.

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Police and hospital authorities did not comment on the exact circumstances of how Saito escaped, citing an ongoing investigation, but security footage provides some clues.

He left the hospital around 9 a.m. on Sunday with just the clothes on his back. Soon after, he called a cab and met it in a nearby park. In that interval, he obtained a backpack that carried clothes, an iPhone, and a portable charger, as can be seen on security video from inside the cab. He paid for the cab, and a $1500 charter flight to nearby Maui, in cash. From there, he flew to the Bay Area of Northern California.

Escape from Hawaii

Hawaiian authorities, U.S. Marshals and the FBI are now all hunting for Saito, but they’ve got some catching up to do; there was an eight-hour pause between when the hospital realized he was gone and when they told law enforcement.

Hospital officials would not comment on the lagging response, but stressed at a Tuesday press conference that their facility is a medical environment, not a prison.

“The hospital’s responsibility is assessment treatment and rehabilitation of individuals with mental health disorders and individuals referred by Hawaii courts. It’s not a custodial environment, it’s not a prison environment — where people are locked up for periods of time — regardless,” said Adult Mental Health Division administrator Dr. Mark Fridovich.

Saito was committed to the hospital in 1981 after he shot 29-year-old Sandra Yamashiro with a pellet gun, stabbed her to death, and stashed her body in a car.

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Signs of necrophilia

Since then, Saito and his attorneys have pushed for his release to no avail. In 1993, he was denied conditional release because he continued to show signs of sadism and necrophilia, psychiatric diagnoses that helped secure his acquittal in 1981. They tried again in 2000, and were again unsuccessful, with one city prosecutor saying Saito, saying Saito “fills all the criteria of a classic serial killer.”

Saito stayed in the headlines after that. In 2003, when it was revealed that Saito was allowed to go home on weekends for conjugal visits over a period of two years, the state held that mental patients don’t have that right, and the facility ended these visits for its patients.

In 2015, city prosecutors also argued against Saito getting passes to leave the hospital grounds without an escort, warning, “He is a very dangerous individual.”

Instead of all the legal wrangling, turns out he just had to walk out, hail a cab, and hit the airport.

Authorities are urging people with information about Saito’s whereabouts to contact the Honolulu police or their local law enforcement agency.