A sex offender was arrested after camping out on a bench outside the Emergency Room at UF Health The Villages Hospital.
Sumter County sheriff’s deputies were called at about 5:30 p.m. Monday to the hospital after a report of a “belligerent” man who refused to leave after being discharged.
He had been discharged at about 11 a.m. that day. Hospital security told deputies that 51-year-old Randal Scott Howard had been sleeping on a bench in front of the Emergency Room exit doors since being discharged.
Howard became a patient at the hospital on Dec. 8 and “due to his medical condition and being a transient at the time of service” he was registered as a temporary resident of the hospital with law enforcement.
Howard, who previously listed an address in Okahumpka, claimed he had been dropped off at the hospital by his brother.
Howard was convicted in 1995 in DeSoto County on a charge of lewd and lascivious molestation of a child under the age of 16. In 2013, he was convicted in Miami-Dade of failure to register as a sex offender.
He is now facing two counts of failure to register as a sex offender and was being held on $20,000 bond at the Sumter County Detention Center.
