Wilfredo Tortolero Arriechi, the 34-year-old man charged with murder for stabbing a social worker to death at 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 an 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 on murder and an allegation that he used a deadly weapon.
On Dec. 4, he was accused of entering Ward 86, the hospital’s HIV clinic, seeking out his doctor, and stabbed social worker Alberto Rangel to death in the hallway.
In the weeks before the incident and earlier that morning, Tortolero Arriechi had allegedly threatened his doctor and sought him out at a clinic in SoMa. Additional security had been requested on the floor, and 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.”