Insane Killer Escapes Captivity During Washington Fair Field Trip

Today I read a story in the newspaper about a criminally insane man in Washington who escaped captivity. The man was doing time in a hospital for killing an elderly woman he thought was a witch, and burying her in her own flower garden. But the man wasn't exactly at the hospital when he escaped his captors, he was at the county fair on a field trip. Yes, a field trip. It turns out that he had tried to escape from a previous day trip to the lake, and when they found him he knocked a police officer unconscious. He was considered "an extreme escape risk."

I'm not really even sure where to begin, as just about every part of this story has something wrong with it. I happen to fall on the side of Washington Governor Chris Gregoire who asked the following upon hearing the news: “Why was he allowed to take such a trip?” and “Why did they go to a location that was so heavily populated with families?” Didn't anyone think this was a bad idea? Who said: " OK, guys, I have a really good plan to get the patients out of the hospital for a while. How about we load them all up, give them a little spending money, and take them to the fair!" "And get this, we let them wear their regular street clothes so that they can just feel normal for a day! Wouldn't it be fun?" But even then, even after this phenomenally awful idea was voiced, who was the guy that approved it? Who thought that rounding up a group of crazies and sending them to a large, open field complete with thousands of children and excessive stimulation would be appropriate? Even better is the fact that they sent a guy who killed an old lady for being a witch into carny land where the workers all have nose warts and claw hands and do magic. It's absurd. Even the man's brother said he should never have been anywhere like that. And now he's just totally ruined it for all the other mental patients as the hospital has decided it's probably not a good idea to let them go on field trips anymore. Too little, too late, if you ask me.