San Francisco hospital patient goes missing for 17 days before being found in the same hospital

Lynne Spalding Ford, 57, went missing from San Francisco General Hospital for nine days before a search was conducted, and then her family and friends joined in a thorough search all over the city. 17 days after she went missing, her body was found in the stairwell of the same hospital, and authorities are giving small amounts of information about what happened to Spalding Ford.

Three days after Spalding Ford was admitted to the hospital for a bladder infection, a hospital worker reported to the sheriff’s department that she had been missing for 40 minutes. For 9 days, small, incomplete searches were done on the hospital grounds, and while some of the hospital stairwells were checked, not all of them got a thorough search. Authorities were not even able to look at surveillance video for some time because of “hardware problems.”

A continuous series of errors and searches that were not properly conducted went on for 17 days, until an engineering specialist at the hospital found Spalding Ford’s body while he was doing a routine check of the building. The sheriff’s department has since said that new guidelines have been put in place to ensure that the situation does not occur again. “I would like to express my sincere condolences to the family and friends of Lynne Spalding Ford,” Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi said. “We have taken immediate measures to address and make certain such a tragedy never happens again.”