RALEIGH - Stephen Wayne Mintz's death received little public attention after he fell out the back of a state-owned laundry truck at Dorothea Dix Hospital in March 2006.

A paid obituary in his hometown newspaper, just four sentences long, didn't mention that he had spent more than half of his life in state prisons or mental institutions. Efforts by his sister to get a local television station to investigate got no response.

For Mintz's mother, questions about her son's death remain unanswered.

"They should have never have put him in the back of that truck," said Ella Mae McGuire. "He was a mental patient. That was not a safe situation."

After The News & Observer recently published a list of 82 patients in mental hospitals who died under questionable circumstances, employees from Dix called the newspaper to ask why Mintz was not included. In the past two weeks, The N&O received documents that McGuire said the state did not share with the family two years ago.

Gov. Mike Easley has said he would support new policies or laws to require state hospitals to share internal reports with the families of the deceased.

"The truth is going to come out, so they'd just as well tell the families what occurred up front," Easley said. "They're probably worried about getting sued. They've got a whole lot less chance of getting sued if they say, 'Look, this was a mistake, we made it, and here's what occurred,' than if they make the family go out and get a lawyer."

Mintz, who was 50 when he died, was born in Maryland but had family in Roseboro, a little town in Sampson County.

McGuire said her son's problems began at age 13, after he ran away from home with a girlfriend during the summer of 1969 to attend the now-famous music festival in Woodstock, N.Y.

When he showed up two weeks later at an uncle's house in North Carolina, McGuire said her son was "not right." Doctors later told her he had likely used drugs that had permanently altered his brain.

In 1977, Mintz shot and killed his father, Fayetteville homebuilder Robert Mintz. McGuire said it was never clear exactly what triggered the shooting, but her son was later diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.

Convicted of manslaughter, Mintz served less than 11 years of a 20-year prison sentence. According to the state's report of his death, on the day Mintz was to be paroled from Central Prison in Raleigh, he assaulted a guard. He was transported across the street to Dorothea Dix, where he would reside for the next 17 years.

Though he had what the report describes as "on-going paranoid delusions ... [with] a strong history of violence," he eventually was granted privileges that allowed him to go anywhere on Dix's sprawling campus and to get a part-time job in the hospital's laundry. He also earned a high-school equivalency diploma and was allowed to live in a small cottage on the hospital grounds.

Fall from truck

On March 5, 2006, Mintz was working a Sunday morning laundry shift as part of a three-person crew that included another patient and a hospital employee. The group loaded laundry baskets into the back of a truck at a hospital building and then set off for the next stop, with the hospital employee driving and Mintz riding alone in the back.

The hospital employee told police he was going about 10 miles an hour when he turned a corner, hit a bump in the road and heard a bang. He looked back and saw Mintz lying in the road, bleeding from his mouth and nose.

According to a 2006 report, officers with the hospital's internal police department concluded Mintz fell when the truck's lift gate dropped open.

No one witnessed the accident, which resulted in fatal head injuries. Mintz died three days later.

State regulators later found no fault with the hospital, though investigators wrote his death might have been avoided had an inexpensive safety pin been used to secure the lift gate's latch.

McGuire said she and other family members went to the hospital to find out what happened.

"We were told very little," McGuire said. "I was very upset."

The state has continued to keep quiet about the incident. State regulators apparently never entered Mintz's information into a database of patient deaths, and a written report was not provided to the newspaper after a December public records request for all such documents.

Officials with the state Department of Health and Human Services, which runs the public mental hospitals, said last week that those omissions were an oversight.

Employee lost job

Records show the employee driving the truck lost his job less than two weeks after the accident. The hospital instituted new policies forbidding patients from riding in the back of trucks and requiring safety pins to secure lift gates.

Now remarried and living in Florida, McGuire has mixed feelings about the hospital that she says helped her son in many ways.

Not long before Mintz's death, McGuire said the Dix staff said he would likely be discharged and asked if she would be willing to let him come live with her in Florida. Instead, she bought a lot outside Roseboro with plans to put a mobile home there for her son.

"After he killed my husband, I was scared to let him live with me," McGuire said. "But I wanted to provide a place so he wouldn't be homeless. I still have the land."

(News researcher Lamara Williams contributed to this report.)