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Hospital employee hurt by gun

By NICOLE MONTESANO and STARLA POINTER

Of the News-Register

A Willamette Valley Medical Center employee was injured on Tuesday, after bringing a loaded firearm to work in a backpack.

According to the hospital, the employee dropped the bag and the gun fired, injuring the employee. No one else was injured or involved.

Hospital CEO Peter Hofstetter said that hospital policy does not allow guns on the premises.

“The hospital is a gun free zone, whether you have a permit or not; that's simply for safety of employees, patients, family, the whole thing,” he said.

Police secured and removed the weapon from the premises.

Hofstetter said Tuesday that since the employee was injured, the hospital had not yet questioned him about why he brought the gun, or begun any type of disciplinary proceedings.

“When somebody's injured we need to let them process through all of that. Today's the day to make sure our employee's all right, the other employees are all right and the hospital is safe and secure, and we're very confident in that,” Hofstetter said.

He said the employee is stable and the injury was “not at all life threatening.”

McMinnville Police Captain Dennis Marks said that private businesses have the right to set policy banning guns from the workplace.

“This is clearly an unfortunate incident and like everbody else , we have certainly heightened attention to this given everything that's going on in the country the last few weeks,” Hofstetter said. “The whole thing is kind of unnerving. We'll make sure all our employees are safe, make sure our policies are up to date, take a look at any education we need to do and sort of go from there.”

Comments

Lulu

Let's just hope the wounded employee could skip the interminable check-in process, during which time he might have croaked.

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