Kaiser's south Sacramento hospital called a taxi cab last weekend to drop off a brain-injured, suicidal young man outside Loaves & Fishes, according to the man's father, who has filed a complaint with state health regulators.

Kaiser declined to discuss the episode, saying in an e-mail that it was constrained by patient privacy laws.

Sacramento police at one point last Saturday had three cars looking for 26-year-old Jason Adams, who had "disappeared" from Kaiser Permanente Medical Center, south Sacramento, and was clearly at risk, according to Konrad Von Schoech, Police Department spokesman.

No police report was taken, but informal notes indicate Kaiser personnel told police the man was unable to care for himself, and was somewhere around Loaves & Fishes near downtown Sacramento, Von Schoech said.

Yet Kaiser sent him there in the first place, according to both Adams' father and David Cook, fleet manager for California Co-op Cab. Cook said Kaiser called a cab for the patient, agreed to pay the fare, and told the driver to take him to Loaves & Fishes.

As Ken Adams tells it, Kaiser only started hunting for Jason after Adams called the hospital in a panic because he had been alerted by the cabdriver.

Adams said the driver told him he was worried about leaving a severely disabled person on his own on the streets, outside a closed homeless services program that would not reopen until Tuesday.

Police found Jason Adams and returned him to Kaiser within a few hours, but his father is still deeply shaken. "Jason has to be in a safe place," he said. "To me it just sounds like Kaiser said, 'we can't deal with him, we're just going to throw him on the street.' "

Seriously disoriented people are deposited only rarely outside Loaves & Fishes, said a nurse there. Patient dumping has been a major problem in other cities, including Los Angeles, where the city has won settlements from hospitals to stop the practice.

Ejected from his own car in a 2005 crash, Jason Adams was left with a badly damaged frontal brain lobe and a short-term memory of only a few minutes, his father said. He can recollect things learned years ago – such as his father's cell phone number – but nothing new.

He often threatens suicide, his father said.

His parents tried for more than a year to care for him at their home in Sacramento's Pocket area, but he became violent and wouldn't take his medications, Ken Adams said. He has walked away from at least two board-and-care homes, and in April he walked onto a freeway, where he was hit by a car and hospitalized for a month, his father said.

Kaiser has been overseeing Jason Adams' care because he is insured by Kaiser, covered under his parents' medical plan, Ken Adams said.

On May 22, late in the evening just before the holiday weekend, Kaiser officials phoned Ken Adams to say his son was stable and Kaiser was trying to find him a new board-and-care home, Adams said. He said Kaiser asked the family to take Jason for the weekend and that they declined, saying they have been unable to manage him.

The next day, after Jason Adams was left outside the shuttered Loaves & Fishes, he was so obviously dysfunctional that a passer-by also phoned his father, calling the number that Jason still can recite, his father said. "I could hear Jason in the background, cussing and hollering, saying 'I'm leaving' and 'You'll find my body,' " Ken Adams said.

He remembers being both frightened and furious.

Once his son was safe, Ken Adams wanted to fill out a crime report accusing Kaiser of "patient dumping," but he said police told him they didn't think that was a crime. He said he called county prosecutors, where a secretary told him the same thing, and directed him to the state Department of Public Health. The department has confirmed it is investigating a recent complaint against Kaiser in south Sacramento but would say nothing further.

Such investigations sometimes can prompt federal reviews, said Carolyn Phillips, deputy city attorney for Los Angeles, which has aggressively pursued hospitals that put homeless or mentally ill people on the streets. Last month the city settled with College Hospital for $1.6 million. The city said the hospital had dumped more than 150 people on Skid Row.

Call The Bee's Carrie Peyton Dahlberg, (916) 321-1086.