Second suicide reported this year at rehab facility

A California man died at the Sierra Tucson rehab center in an apparent suicide Aug. 27 — the second patient death at the upscale facility this year, reports from law enforcement confirm.

The patient in the most recent incident hanged himself in his bathroom closet with two shoelaces tied together, the witness who found him at 1:15 p.m. that day told the Pinal County Sheriff’s Department. He was pronounced dead at 1:44 p.m., the report says.

The sheriff’s department arrived at 1:49 p.m. and the Golder Ranch Fire Department was already on the scene.

The patient, whose name and age were redacted from the report, was discovered by an employee at the facility who checked his room when he missed a 1 p.m. appointment. An employee told the sheriff’s department that the last time the patient had been seen alive was at 12:30 p.m.

An autopsy report has not yet been released. The man’s family is being represented by Tucson attorney Dev Sethi, who had no comment Friday.

Officials from the Arizona Department of Health Services this week said they’d been notified of an incident at Sierra Tucson, and that they don’t comment on ongoing investigations.

Sierra Tucson’s chief executive officer William D. Anderson wrote in an email this week that due to “federal and state patient privacy and confidentiality, we cannot comment on any specific incident or patient.”

The apparent suicide marks the fifth patient death at Sierra Tucson since August 2011. The state of Arizona, which licenses the facility, this summer placed Sierra Tucson on a provisional license following an investigation into a suicide on Jan. 23. A provisional license means the facility is subject to stepped up monitoring by the state.

In that case, a 55-year-old Pennsylvania man, whose family asked that he not be publicly identified, hanged himself with a belt in his room. Sierra Tucson paid a $7,500 fine to the state for failing to follow its own rules on keeping track of patients, though its leaders put a handwritten note on the agreement saying that paying the fine was not an admission of wrongdoing.

Investigators with the Department of Health Services found no evidence the patient had attended any of his scheduled activities that day, nor that any staff members had seen him that morning. He was discovered at 12:41 p.m. and pronounced dead at 1:13 p.m.

The facility is on a 160-acre site at 39580 S. Lago del Oro Parkway along the Pinal-Pima county border. It has programs to help patients with addictions, mood disorders, chronic pain, eating disorders and trauma through its “Sierra Model” of integrating therapies such as massage, yoga and acupuncture with traditional psychiatry.

Sierra Tucson was founded in 1983 by recovering cocaine addict William O’Donnell Jr. at the former Brave Bull Guest Ranch. The center has had a reputation as a rehab center to the stars, with reports of celebrity patients such as Rob Lowe, Tiger Woods and Ringo Starr. Most patients are in their late 30s and early 40s. A majority of patients self-pay at a cost of about $1,300 per day.

Sierra Tucson is the flagship facility of California-based CRC Health Group, which was recently acquired by behavioral-health giant Acadia Healthcare.

In October 2014, Acadia bought CRC Health Group from private equity firm Bain Capital for $1.2 billion, according to Becker’s Hospital CFO Report. Publicly traded Acadia has inpatient behavioral health facilities in the U.S., England and Puerto Rico. The company’s profit and revenue are up. Its stock price as of Aug. 21 was $73.68, up from $50.26 on Aug. 21, 2014.

In addition to the Jan. 23 and Aug. 27 deaths this year, three other patients have died during stays at Sierra Tucson:

A 20-year-old East Coast man, who had been in Sierra Tucson for drug rehabilitation, died April 13, 2014, of acute drug toxicity. An autopsy said it was unclear whether the lethal drug mix was intentional or accidental. His family did not want the patient to be identified by name.
On Jan. 2, 2014 a 59-year-old patient, whose family also requested anonymity, hanged himself with a shoelace from a shower head. He died three days later at Oro Valley Hospital.
In 2011, Dr. Kenneth Litwack, a 71-year-old Orange County, California, physician with anxiety and depression, disappeared from Sierra Tucson. He was reported missing and a public search was conducted. Two weeks later he was found dead near Sierra Tucson’s stable, about a quarter-mile from the main building. An autopsy could not determine how he died.