SALEM (AP) — Michael Sands’ dramatic escape from a locked psychiatric ward at Oregon State Hospital began when he accosted a female staff member early in the morning and took her keys and identification card.

After slipping out of the hospital’s 50 building at about 1:30 a.m. last Friday, he carjacked a vehicle, rammed a patrol car, assaulted an officer, resisted a police dog and was finally subdued by the electric shock of a Taser.

Homer Woods, a forensic psychiatric patient at the hospital, saw Sands overpower the female employee.

“From what I could tell, she was attacked from the back,” Woods said. “She turned around and tried to keep her keys and identification card from being ripped away from her.”

But Sands, who’s from Brookings, has a criminal history that includes carjackings, police chases and an officer assault, was able to wrest them away.

Questions have been raised over how Sands was able to get out of the building.

“Exit from the 50 Building at OSH requires that the identification badge be swiped at two gates,” said Richard Yates, a retired unit director in the hospital’s forensic program.

“Swiping the badge brings up a picture of the staff member on the computer monitor at the Communications Center,” Yates said in an e-mail to the Statesman-Journal. “The security staff there match the computer monitor picture with the live camera view and then release the lock.

Yates wrote: “Why did security staff open the two gates when the escapee looked nothing like the staff member whose badge he used ?”

Deputy Hospital Superintendent Maynard Hammer said he has ruled out staff negligence as a contributing factor.

Hammer said hospital employees did their best to respond to the escape — officially described as the only known case in which a patient has bolted from a locked ward by stealing keys and exiting through security gates.

He said security protocols in the hospital’s communications center, as described by Yates, may have “gotten lost in the shuffle” amid the fast-unfolding escape, thin nightshift staffing and confusion.

“Having been there at that communications center for a number of emergency events, fire response and things like that, it gets overwhelming real quick,” he said. “Everything happens all at once, and there really aren’t enough communications center staff to take care of business.”

In this case, Hammer said, hospital employees responded quickly.

A nurse who had been conversing with Woods hit a panic alarm after seeing the assault on the female employee.

As soon as the nurse realized that Sands had escaped from the ward, she made a phone call to update the communications center: The assault had become an escape.

“The first instinct she had was to get folks showing up because she saw the assault,” Hammer said. “Then when he got the keys and got out, she immediately called. So the communications center was trying to respond to a panic alarm, an escape call, and (control) all the gates for the response to the panic alarm.”

All of that put intense pressure on the communications center to conduct standard security checks at the gates, Hammer said.

“It looked like everybody acted with impressive speed. There just wasn’t enough folks, and nobody expected this kind of issue to happen.”