HONOLULU — Employees of a Hawaii psychiatric hospital will be placed on unpaid leave for 30 days while authorities investigate how a patient who was tried and acquited on a murder charge escaped and flew to California over the weekend.

The suspensions come after Randall Saito left Hawaii State Hospital on Sunday morning. He was arrested in California on Wednesday after taking two flights to get there.

Hawaii Department of Health director Virginia Pressler says an internal investigation indicates employees inadvertently or intentionally neglected proper notification of supervisors and proper supervision of Saito.

It took the hospital at least eight hours to notify law enforcement officials that he was missing.

Pressler says the escape was a major breakdown of staff protocols.

Governor David Ige says authorities and the public should have been notified much sooner. He says he’s directed the attorney general to investigate.

Saito, who was acquitted of a 1979 murder by reason of insanity, left the state hospital on Sunday, took a taxi to a chartered plane bound for the island of Maui, and then boarded another plane to San Jose, Calif., Honolulu police said.

Saito was captured in the city of Stockton on Wednesday morning as the result of a tip from an alert taxi driver, the San Joaquin County Sheriff’s Department said.

The department posted a photograph on social media showing Saito surrounded by three deputies at a gas station.

Hospital staff called 911 to report his disappearance shortly after 7:30 p.m. Sunday — two hours after he landed in San Jose, Honolulu police said.

An all-points bulletin was issued at 8:30 p.m.

Honolulu police received a tip that Saito was on his way to a brother’s home in Stockton and forwarded that information to authorities in California, Honolulu CrimeStoppers Sergeant Chris Kim said.

It wasn’t immediately known how he was able to charter a plane. Police wouldn’t provide details about his flight to California.

The FBI and US Marshals Service reviewed security footage from San Jose International Airport in connection with the manhunt Tuesday, said Jon Vaden, a spokesman for the airport.

Late Tuesday night, the Hawaii attorney general’s office charged Saito with felony escape and issued a $500,000 bench warrant for his arrest.

Saito was committed to the hospital outside Honolulu in 1981, two years after he was acquitted in the killing of Sandra Yamashiro.

The victim was shot and repeatedly stabbed and her body was found in her car at a mall.

‘‘He is a very dangerous individual,’’ said Wayne Tashima, a Honolulu prosecutor who argued in 2015 against Saito receiving passes to leave the hospital grounds without an escort.

It was not immediately clear under what circumstances Saito left the facility in Kaneohe, a Honolulu suburb.

Hawaii State Hospital Administrator William May said officials are fully cooperating with law enforcement and appropriate steps would be taken if Saito had help from someone inside the facility.

Defense attorneys sought to have Saito released in 2000. But Jeff Albert, a deputy city prosecutor, objected, saying Saito ‘‘fills all the criteria of a classic serial killer.’’

In 1993, a court denied Saito’s request for conditional release, saying he continued to suffer from sexual sadism and necrophilia.

The state Department of Health operates the hospital, which houses over 300 patients in Kaneohe. The department said it is investigating the escape.

Saito was the impetus for a rule change in 2003, when the state attorney general’s office decided mental patients committed to Hawaii State Hospital have no legal right to conjugal visits.

The issue came to light when the hospital administrator learned that Saito had been escorted home for weekend conjugal visits for two years. The administrator blocked the visits away from the facility and on its grounds.

Dangerous psychiatric patients have escaped recently from other facilities in the United States.

In Washington state in 2016 a man accused of torturing a woman to death broke out of the state’s largest mental hospital.

Anthony Garver crawled out of a window of his ground-floor room at Western State Hospital, rode a bus to Spokane and was captured.