HONOLULU – Authorities have captured the man officials called a “violent psychopath” after he escaped from a Hawaii hospital Sunday and fled to California, the San Joaquin County Sheriff’s Office announced Wednesday.
Deputies arrested 59-year-old Randall Toshio Saito around 10:30 a.m. in Stockton after an alert taxi cab driver called police. He was arrested along Waterloo Road near Highway 99, a stretch of road with scattered gas stations, motels and fast food restaurants.
Maui police announced Tuesday that Saito managed to escape Oahu’s Hawaii State Hospital and catch a flight to Maui before flying to San Jose, California Sunday evening, according to KHNL.
It’s not yet clear how Saito managed to leave the state-run facility undetected. Police released images purportedly showing Saito in the back of a taxi cab on his way to the airport.
The Hawaii State Department of Health, which runs the hospital, declined to give details about the escape, citing an ongoing investigation and privacy laws.
In 1981, authorities committed Saito to the hospital following the gruesome murder of 29-year-old Sandra Yamashiro, who prosecutors said Saito shot and stabbed numerous times before leaving her body at Ala Moana Center in Honolulu.
Saito was acquitted of the murder by reason of insanity.
He filed for a conditional release in 1993 but was denied after the court said he still had an attraction to necrophilia and suffered from sadistic, sexual urges that made him a danger to the community.
“Randall Saito is a very disturbed, mentally ill individual,” said deputy prosecutor Jeff Albert at the time, according to KHON. “He’s a very dangerous individual with respect to whom all the predictors indicate that if he were to be released, he would kill again.”
His attorneys’ request for release was denied again in 2000, at which time Albert said Saito “fills all the criteria of a classic serial killer.”
