Escape From the Mayo Clinic: Parents Break Teen Out of World-Famous Hospital

In late February of 2018, the parents of 18-year-old high school senior Alyssa Gilderhus, Duane and Amber Engebretson, decided to break her out of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota where she had been a patient for 2 months. Alyssa had had a brain aneurysm on Christmas Day and fortunately neurosurgeons saved her life. But Alyssa and her parents became disgruntled with the continued care and their requests to be transferred to another facility were ignored.

So the parents devised a plan to escape, but it had to maneuvered just right because there were now 2 nurses on the door of their daughter’s hospital room acting as guards. Pretending the great-grandparent was at the entrance and wanted to see Alyssa, they managed to leave, and their younger daughter Allie filmed the experience.

The next day, after an eventful night of running from the cops and the medical facility that they learned were trying to get the county courts to grant guardianship of Alyssa to, Duane and Amber Engebretson brought her to a non-Mayo owned hospital in South Dakota. The doctors there prescribed her medications and deemed her mentally fit, and discharged them to care for her at home.

See Elizabeth Cohen & John Bonifield, Escape From the Mayo Clinic: Parents Break Teen Out of World-Famous Hospital, CNN, August 13, 2018.

Special thanks to Laura Galvan (Attorney, San Antonio, Texas) for bringing this article to my attention.