Lynne Spalding Ford body found 17 days after missing from hospital

Originally published on November 8, 2013

A the body of a patient at San Francisco General Hospital was discovered 17 days after she was reported missing by hospital staff. Lynne Spalding Ford, 57, checked into the California hospital for a bladder infection on September 19. A hospital employee noticed she was missing on September 21, but a series of mishaps by authorities resulted in her body not being found until October 8 in an outdoor stairwell.

When a hospital employee called the sheriff's department on September 21, Spalding Ford was reported to have been missing for 40 minutes, according to San Francisco Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi said. The caller described the patient as African-American, while the sheriff's department logbook described her as Asian. Spalding Ford was, in fact, Caucasian. The sheriff's department later sent officials to conduct a perimeter search of the hospital grounds, but they did not immediately classify the patient as a missing person.

On September 25, the San Francisco Police Department asked the sheriff's department to look over surveillance video to see if there are any images of the patient leaving. The next day, the sheriff's department tried to look through footage, but couldn't "due to hardware problems," according to Mirkarimi. The vendor responsible for maintaining the video equipment was notified.

On September 30, nine days after Spalding Ford went missing, the hospital asked sheriff's deputies to search its entire 24-acre campus. But that search didn't include all stairwells. The next day, a officials looked through the stairwells again after realizing not all had been searched. However, still only about half of them were searched.

On October 3, the video equipment vendor recovered surveillance video from the hard drive, and images are given to San Francisco police the next day. A hospital employee reported to the sheriff's department that someone saw a person lying on the 3rd- or 4th-floor landing of Stairwell 8 on October 4. That same day, an employee on the fifth floor reported hearing banging coming from the same stairwell.

Finally, on October 8, October 8 a hospital engineering employee who was carrying out a routine check found Spalding Ford's body in an exterior stairwell.

According to the hospital and sheriff's department, the alarmed stairwell leads to the hospital grounds at the bottom, and "is a fire exit that is not routinely used by staff, patients or the public."

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