I Evaluate Dangerous Patients. One Case Will HAUNT Me Forever.

Vernon Price had been to Bridgewater State Hospital before, back when he was still with the state police. The place handled the worst cases—criminally insane, violent offenders, people the regular system couldn't manage. When an envelope arrived from the Massachusetts Executive Office of Health and Human Services asking him to evaluate a facility claim about a dangerous patient supposedly ready for reduced restrictions, he had a pretty good guess who it was.

Six years earlier, Price had interviewed a 22-year-old patient named Beau Haley at a medium-security facility. Beau had been committed after a string of arsons that escalated into an attempt on his stepfather's house. The stepfather made it out; the family dog didn't. During the interview, Beau sat calm and cooperative, answered every question, said all the right things. "He smiled a lot," Price recalls. "Not a big smile. Just this little twitch at the corner of his mouth." Price didn't buy it. He wrote in his report that the patient's responses appeared coached and recommended continued observation. Three days later, Beau started a fire in the common room during shift change using cleaning supplies he'd been pocketing. Two orderlies—Carson Medina and Remy Johnson—died trying to get other patients out. Beau walked out through the smoke with that same little