Tighter Security Is Promised at County Mental Health Unit : Ventura: Officials at a meeting of fearful residents urge compassion in response to requests for Mace and alarms.

County officials promised fearful Ventura residents Saturday that psychiatric patients will be kept under tighter security, after a patient was arrested last week in the fatal stabbing of 90-year-old Velasta Johnson.

But the officials also answered the residents’ requests for Mace and alarms with the suggestion that compassion and medication are better responses to patients who walk away from the Ventura County Mental Health facility.

County Mental Health Director Randall Feltman said a psychiatric worker will be assigned to patrol the neighborhood full time to return walkaways to the facility.

He also promised neighbors that until a high-security hospital is finished in 1993, the county’s mobile psychiatric team will answer neighbors’ calls about walkaway patients immediately.

“We’re trying to contain people in a building with 12 doors to the outside, as well as trying to care for people in the worst times in their lives,” Feltman told more than 150 residents who packed the community meeting room of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church. “I assure you, we want to be good neighbors.”

Feltman’s remarks closed a meeting that had begun when neighbors, officials and church staff members bowed their heads in prayer for Johnson and her alleged killer, a 25-year-old drifter named Kevin Jon Kolodziej.

Kolodziej walked away from the intensive-care unit of the Ventura County Medical Center, a few hundred yards from the mental health facility.

Johnson’s husband and daughters sat holding hands at the center of the emotional, often tense crowd as speakers sought to lay blame for Johnson’s death and offer solutions to their continuing complaints of walkaway psychiatric patients.

Some neighbors suggested buying Mace to ward off intruders or tagging the patients’ gowns so an alarm would sound if they left the 24-bed mental health facility, which cannot be locked because of fire laws.

Others urged compassion, saying that nearly all psychiatric patients are harmless.

Then Johnson’s daughters spoke.

“They do not think like we do,” said Jackie Thetford, fighting back tears. “We’re locked in and they’re out wandering. Now that, to me, is not the way it should be.

“None of you want to go through what I’m going through. Who do we blame? The Police Department says they’re not to blame. The hospital says they’re not to blame. The mental (health) man says he’s not to blame. So I guess it’s my mother’s fault for being home.”

“We are not here to point fingers, but to get something done,” said Johnson’s other daughter, Sharyn Flanigan.

“We’ve tried for a long time to get a locked facility,” said Patricia Sandwall, a member of the Ventura chapter of the California Alliance for the Mentally Ill, who urged compassion for psychiatric patients.

Kolodziej is scheduled to be arraigned Feb. 6 on a murder charge. “Most probably his family has tried many times to get him into the hospital,” Sandwall said, “but the mental health institutions don’t take care of the sickest people, they really take care of those who are easiest to treat.”

Some longtime residents of the neighborhood near the hospital demanded to know who is responsible for keeping them safe.

“Should we lock our neighborhood and become an armed camp?” said Mary Ellen Farley, who lives two doors from Clyde and Velasta Johnson. “Should St. Paul’s put up barbed wire fences to protect our children? Where does the responsibility lie?”

While some residents urged formation of a Neighborhood Watch program, others criticized the Police Department for not escorting psychiatric walkaways back to the hospital.

Still others accused the state of relaxing commitment laws about 20 years ago to release patients from Camarillo State Hospital without setting up adequate outpatient care.

“Any time they take a patient over here, it is pretty much a revolving door,” neighbor Nancy Connelly said of the mental health facility.

“The government let all the people loose, put them on the streets, starved them to death, you name it,” Marvin Castleberry said. “Let’s get them back into Camarillo State Hospital. Let’s let them have the surveillance and supervision they need.”

“I’m a mental patient!” shouted Erma Harris, angered by Castleberry’s suggestion. “He’s got the gall to stand there and tell me I need to be locked up?”

Harris said of mental patients, “They’re only walking the sidewalk to relieve the pressure.”

Lou Matthews, a member of the Alliance for the Mentally Ill, said, “There ought to be a change in the law to make it more effective to treat the mentally ill. . . . Their condition can become so desperate that most of you cannot imagine what it’s like.”

Then city and county officials addressed the neighbors’ questions and complaints.

One man asked whether police, who stopped Kolodziej and released him an hour before Johnson’s slaying because they had no legal right to hold him, would begin escorting walkaway patients back to the psychiatric unit.

“If it’s legally possible to do that, we will do it,” Capt. Pat Rooney said, drawing angry muttering from many in the crowd. He said later that police cannot take custody of patients unless a hospital has ordered them held for observation, or they are a clear danger to themselves or others.

Feltman then promised to increase security measures and quick response for walkaway psychiatric patients. And he offered phone numbers for neighborhood residents with concerns.

Reports of walkaways should be made to the county crisis team at 652-6727. Penny Matthews, supervisor of inpatient care services, can be reached at 652-6740. And Feltman offered his own office number, 652-6737.

Johnson’s family and friends circulated a petition demanding that the hospital, county mental health officials, the city and Police Department institute procedures to prevent incidents such as Johnson’s slaying from recurring.

By the meeting’s end, nearly 200 people had signed it.