TB patient treated in Denver returns to Moscow

PHOENIX - A tuberculosis patient who was quarantined in a Phoenix hospital jail ward for nearly a year fled the country on Sunday.

He apparently wanted to escape possible prosecution by the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office and to reunite with his family in Russia.

Robert Daniels, who was ruled no longer contagious after lung surgery in Denver last month, had been living in a Valley motel under monitoring by Maricopa County Public Health officials for the past few weeks.

His attorney, Linda Cosme, said he sent her an email from Moscow after arriving there on a flight Sunday.

"He apologized," Cosme said. "Essentially, he could not take the abuse from the county. He felt threatened (by Sheriff Joe Arpaio). He just couldn't take it any more."

Daniels, who was born in Moscow to an American father and Russian mother, holds dual citizenship and spent some of his childhood in Scottsdale. He was treated for drug-resistant TB early last year after moving from Moscow to Arizona in search of work. He left his wife, Alla, and a son in Russia.

A call to the family's residence at 3 a.m. Moscow time was answered by Alla, who declined to put her husband on the phone, saying, "He's asleep."

In Phoenix, the 28-year-old Daniels was placed in solitary confinement last August in the jail ward at Maricopa Medical Center. A judge had ruled that he recklessly exposed others to his illness by going out in public without a mask. The Sheriff's Office treated Daniels as an inmate while in custody, confining him in isolation and under video surveillance for most of the time with no phone, shower, television or other comforts.

Daniels fought a losing battle in Superior Court to improve his living conditions. That case has been sealed, and litigants recently were placed under a gag order.

Meanwhile, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a federal lawsuit this summer, but proceedings were suspended when county health officials agreed to send Daniels to National Jewish Medical and Research Center in Denver. While at the hospital, Daniels had a lung removed. Doctors there also determined that he is no longer contagious, and that he never had extreme drug-resistant TB, the deadly diagnosis given by health experts in Arizona. Instead, he had a less serious strain, multi-drug-resistant TB.

Nevertheless, Daniels was returned to Phoenix in September and ordered to submit to monitoring by the county for at least 18 months. Authorities at one point sought to require that he wear a tracking device on his ankle. "I still consider myself very American," Daniels said at the time, "but what America is doing to me is just unbelievable."

Arpaio, who was stung by negative news accounts of Daniels' treatment, said Monday he intended to have the man arrested for reckless endangerment, but was stymied because investigators have been unable to get medical files as evidence.

Arpaio said he believes Daniels was under court order not to leave the country.

"Maybe now they (the public) will understand this guy is untrustworthy," added Arpaio. "He lies . . . and he skipped. What, did the heat get too much for him? He had to run to Russia?"

Cosme said Daniels was traumatized by his year in sheriff's custody and "terrified" when he was forced to return to Phoenix.