CHARLESTON, South Carolina (Reuters) — An
escaped South Carolina mental hospital inmate charged with the 2006
murders of his mother and stepfather was captured in Tennessee on
Friday, police said.
Jason Mark Carter, 39, drove away from the G. Werber Bryan
Psychiatric Hospital in Columbia on Thursday in a state-owned van.
He was captured without incident early Friday at a hotel west of
Nashville, the Tennessee Highway Patrol said.
Carter had since 2010 held a paid job in a patient work program that
allowed him to drive in a van with a staff member outside the locked
hospital fence to deliver supplies, said Mark Binkley, deputy
director for administration at the South Carolina state Mental
Health Department.
The program has been suspended pending a department review, Binkley
said. "We will go where the facts lead us and where we find that
someone was not doing their job, there will be disciplinary action,"
he said Friday.
The Tennessee Highway Patrol said it appeared Carter stole the van
and later purchased a Chevrolet Lumina. He had checked into the
hotel where he was found, but it was unclear how he got money to buy
a car or pay for the room.
Binkley said the state-owned van has not been recovered. The
department had never had an escape from the criminal facility
before, he said.
Carter was committed to the hospital after a judge in 2009 found him
not guilty by reason of insanity in the murders of Kevin and Debra
Ann Perkins, his stepfather and mother, said Rosemary Littleton,
spokeswoman for the state's 10th Judicial Circuit Court.
Captain Greg Reed, head of criminal investigations for the Oconee
County Sheriff's Office, said Carter's mother and stepfather were
"well to do."
Deputies in March 2006 had found Carter inside a locked room in the
basement of a home with the couple's bodies, which were wrapped in
plastic, Reed said. They had been shot and the bodies had been in
the room for a couple of days, he said. No motive was established
for the deaths.
(Additional reporting by Eric M. Johnson;
editing by Colleen Jenkins
and Andrew Hay)
