The man who killed his psychiatrist in Bethesda in 2006 was charged Friday night with murdering his roommate in a Howard County psychiatric hospital. Maryland State Police said Vitali Davydov, 24, the Gaithersburg man who beat his psychiatrist to death at age 19, came out of his room around 2:30 p.m. Friday and asked for help. Staff members entered and found Davydov’s roommate, 22-year-old David Rico-Noyola, on the floor bleeding, with trauma to his head and body. He was declared dead by an emergency room doctor.
Authorities detained Davydov and charged him later that night with first and second degree murder.
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Both men were patients in the maximum security ward of the Clifton T. Perkins Hospital in Jessup, Md. A nurse checked on the two patients only 30 minutes before the assault and observed nothing unusual. No motive has yet been determined for the crime, police said.
In 2007 Davydov was found guilty but not criminally responsible — meaning legally insane — in the slaying of prominent Bethesda psychiatrist Wayne Stuart Fenton. Davydov, a schizophrenia patient, beat the therapist to death after thinking that the man had asked to be killed. A judge ordered Davydov to stay at the maximum security hospital until authorities no longer consider him dangerous.
It’s the second patient murder at the Clifton T. Perkins Hospital in two years. Saladin Taylor is currently on trial for the murder of 45-year-old Susan Sachs in 2010. He is accused of sneaking into her room, kissing her and then strangling her with a shoe string.
A former patient, 55-year-old Antoinette Starks, released from Perkins in August, stabbed another woman in a Target parking lot in Bowie earlier this month.
Officials said the investigation is ongoing. Rico-Noyola’s body will be taken to the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Baltimore for an autopsy.
