A 75-year-old woman who had been missing for 10 days was found dead in the stairwell of a locked power plant building at Zuckerburg San Francisco General Hospital May 30, according to the Los Angeles Times.
A hospital staff member found the woman's body around 1 p.m. in a stairwell that is usually locked and only accessible to maintenance workers.
"We don't know how this woman gained access to the area where she was found, and we are absolutely looking into that," Rachael Kagan, a spokesperson for the San Francisco Health Department, which operates the hospital, told The LA Times.
The woman, identified as Ruby Anderson, was not a patient at the Zuckerberg San Francisco Hospital. Ms. Anderson's daughter, Charlene Roberts, said her mother had dementia and vanished from a nearby mental health facility May 20, according to CBS.
The May 30 discovery is similar to an incident that occurred at Zuckerberg San Francisco Hospital in 2013, in which a 57-year-old patient was found dead in an emergency stairwell 17 days after she vanished from her hospital room.
After an autopsy in 2013, a medical examiner determined the 57-year-old patient died from dehydration and complications from alcoholism. After that patient's death, San Francisco General revamped its security efforts to prevent similar incidents.
"That was a terrible tragedy. We've made many, many changes since that time, and we have no reason to believe that this case and that case are connected, but we don't know very much about this situation yet," Ms. Kagan told CBS.