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Smith stayed behind inside the nearly empty ward and was walking to the bathroom when he says he was struck from behind and knocked to the floor. He was then "swooped up" by three staffers.

He kicked one of them, James A. Smith, in the groin -- a reflex that he says sparked a severe beating, with staff members repeatedly punching and kicking him.

"I'd seen what they did to other patients," said Dean Smith, who believes the attack was premeditated to occur when supervisors were out smoking. "I thought the best thing to do was resist, because somebody might hear something. I thought they were going to kill me."

The assault continued as he was dragged down a hall and into a secluded room. As he sat on the floor bleeding, Dean Smith says, he was coached to say he had injured himself in a fall and was threatened with further violence if he reported what happened.

He was then forced to take off his blood-soaked clothes, clean up pools of his own blood and take a shower before he was allowed to get medical treatment from a nurse for injuries that included a broken nose and rib.

The hospital's internal police department was asked to find out what happened. Dean Smith, still bleeding and with dark bruises emerging on his body, was photographed by an officer. The report describes his face as looking like "hamburger meat."

In a police lineup, he identified health-care technicians James Smith, Eric Jerrod Isler and Billy Gerald Wynn Jr. as the employees who had beaten him. Investigators matched the tread on Isler's shoes to purple bruises left on Dean Smith's flesh.

James Smith and Isler both said Wynn was the one who hit Dean Smith. Wynn told investigators that he was not present when the patient was injured but that he later walked in on the other two employees while they had Smith in the back room.

'Too many to count'

In an interview, Wynn said his co-workers were coerced by hospital police officers and administrators to lie about his hitting Dean Smith.

Asked how many abuse complaints were filed against him during his 13 years at Cherry Hospital, Wynn said he didn't know.

"Too many to count," he said. "There isn't a person working at Cherry who hasn't had some allegations."

Some of those incidents are outlined in Wynn's personnel file, part of which is disclosed in an investigative report. In the months before Smith was beaten, Wynn received written warnings for placing a pillow six inches from a restrained patient's face and for improperly grabbing a patient and putting his hands on his chest.

Though all those accusations were lies, he said, the "therapeutic hold" techniques taught for safely restraining mental patients were sometimes impractical during a physical altercation.

Some of the patients at Cherry, which serves an area that includes several military bases, are former soldiers and Marines with training in hand-to-hand combat. If a patient starts acting aggressively, Wynn said, in his experience it was best to go ahead and "put him down."

"I'm not the sort of person I'm out there to abuse patients," Wynn said. "You get backhanded in the mouth, who knows? You might react."

One of the earlier complaints against Wynn involved Jason DeArellano, who was a patient on the same ward six months before Dean Smith was assaulted.

William O. Mann III, a staff psychiatrist at Cherry in 2006, filed an abuse complaint on DeArellano's behalf after he noticed large bruises on his patient's face, though no report of an injury was included in his medical records, as required.

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