Wilfredo Tortolero Arriechi, the 34-year-old man charged with murder for stabbing a social worker to death at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital last month, denied the allegations today through his attorney.
Public defender Sylvia Nguyen said that Tortolero Arriechi, who appeared in court today and was wearing orange jail garb and white flip-flops, pleaded not guilty to his charges. She said he was going through a “crisis” the day of the stabbing.
“It’s obviously clear that he was suffering a mental-health crisis that day,” Nguyen told Mission Local in an interview. “It was almost three weeks before he was even stabilized enough to be able to come to court.”
Tortolero Arriechi listened to the brief proceedings through a Spanish interpreter.
Tortolero Arriechi was charged on Dec. 8 with murder and with use of a deadly weapon.
On Dec. 4, he was accused of entering Ward 86, the hospital’s HIV clinic, seeking out his doctor, and stabbing social worker Alberto Rangel to death in the hallway.
In the weeks before the incident and earlier on the morning of Dec. 4, Tortolero Arriechi had allegedly threatened his doctor and sought him out at a clinic in SoMa. Additional security had been requested on the floor on Ward 86. A sheriff’s deputy was purportedly guarding that doctor, but not the entrance to the clinic.
Hospital workers have since spoken out about unsafe conditions that they say were largely ignored.
Nguyen told Mission Local that Tortolero Arriechi, who missed past court dates for his arraignment over the past month, was “still stabilizing.”
“It’s obviously clear that he was suffering a mental health crisis that day,”
Oh, well I guess it’s all fine then.
Oingo Boingo’s Only a Lad comes to mind.
You really can’t blame him / society made him
He really couldn’t help it / he didn’t want to do it / he’s underprivileged and abused / perhaps a little bit confused
He didn’t mean to hit the poor man who had to go and die
Perhaps if we’re nice, he’ll go away
Basically you always plead not guilty at first. It’s how our adversarial system works. If you were arrested for a crime this serious, you’d plead not guilty at first, too, even if you obviously did it.