Shana Soliz, who is accused of killing Paul Mottinger last month, is only one of many inmates in the Grays Harbor County Jail with some form of mental or behavioral illness. She is bipolar and has use disorders with opioids, stimulants and cannabis.

Before Mottinger died, he told law enforcement “Shana stabbed me” as he was being treated for multiple wounds inflicted by a hunting knife.

Soliz, 45, of Hoquiam, made several strange statements in court on Nov. 22, a day after her arrest on suspicion of first-degree murder.

“I stabbed him because I wasn’t sure he was one of the people,” she told the judge when she explained why she stabbed Mottinger. “He wanted oil.”

While in court she also said the oil was in her backyard and that she was “defending her property.”

Police said she began stabbing Mottinger with a hunting knife inside her home, then followed him outside to the street where she continued her attack. She went back inside her home after she stopped stabbing Mottinger. She was taken into custody after an hours-long standoff with law enforcement.

Soliz was first diagnosed as bipolar when she was only 16 years old. She told authorities she was hospitalized to treat her condition probably once a year. She was receiving medications to treat mental illness while in county jail earlier this year and her condition appeared to stabilize. That incarceration was in connection to another incident — a non-fatal stabbing of another man.

That incident was reduced to a third-degree assault though the original charge was second-degree assault domestic violence. During her competency evaluation, she told a mental health professional the victim “wanted me put away because I’m Libyan and he found oil in my backyard. He planned to provoke me so I would lose the house and he would go and buy it.”

When pressed, however, Soliz said she knew there was no oil in her backyard. She was found to be competent enough to participate in her own defense but that without her medications she “may or may not continue to present with the requisite capacities to proceed.”

Soliz was also determined to be a low-risk to commit future violent, felony and property-violent crimes, according to the risk assessment report done after the non-fatal stabbing.

She received credit for time served and was back at home several weeks before the November homicide occurred. The original charge of second degree assault was reduced to third degree assault. She was released with conditions, such as not possessing dangerous weapons.

Soliz had two other recent encounters with police. Both were incidents of fourth-degree assaults in Hoquiam. One was an incident where she punched and screamed at a man, and the other was an event in which she put a heavy object inside her fist and punched the victim, also a male.

A third fourth-degree assault charge occurred in 2012 elsewhere in the county, said Steve Johnson, the city attorney.

Sheriff Rick Scott said between 80 and 90 percent of inmates at the county jail are mentally ill or either dependent or addicted to drugs or alcohol — or suffering from a combination of these issues.

“The mentally ill take up a huge amount of our resources,” he said. “Jails throughout the state are being used as a location to maintain and care for the mentally ill. Jails aren’t designed for that purpose. We need to build more mental health facilities.”

Scott seeks to add staff to the jail over the next few years because of inmates’ needs and the sheer number of people in custody there.

Soliz’s bail was set at $500,000 when she appeared in District Court last month. She is scheduled to return to court on Dec. 15.

She had two other recent encounters with police. Both were incidents of fourth-degree assaults in Hoquiam. A third fourth-degree assault charge occurred in 2012, said Steve Johnson, the city attorney of Hoquiam.