DENVER — The gunman who killed a Colorado sheriff’s deputy escaped from the mental health ward of a VA hospital in Wyoming in 2014 but was located and returned, according to a Veterans Affairs document obtained by The Associated Press Tuesday.
The document was provided to the AP by a congressional aide on condition of anonymity because the aide was not authorized to release it.
The gunman, Matthew Riehl, 37, fatally shot Douglas County Deputy Zackari Parrish and wounded four other officers on Sunday, Colorado authorities said.
Riehl was killed by a SWAT team.
The VA document said Riehl was hospitalized at the veterans medical center in Sheridan, Wyo., in April 2014 after a psychotic episode. The document said he escaped but was found and brought back.
The VA issued a statement saying it “cannot ordinarily discuss the specific care of any veteran without a privacy release.” A spokeswoman for the Sheridan VA hospital did not respond to an after-hours phone message and email.
In addition to Riehl’s hospitalization in Sheridan, the VA document said he had an “urgent contact for mental health” with another VA facility in July 2015. It did not describe the nature of the contact or say where that facility was, but it was in the department’s Eastern Colorado Health Care System, which includes a hospital in Denver and nine clinics in other cities.
The document said Riehl was on multiple medications in 2015 stemming from an earlier hospitalization, but it did not say what those medications were or why they had been prescribed.
The document identified Riehl as an Army veteran who was honorably discharged. It said his records did not list any military service-related psychiatric disorders.
Colorado authorities said Riehl served in Iraq.
Officials said Riehl was armed with a rifle and ambushed the officers at his apartment in Highlands Ranch, 16 miles south of Denver.
