On Wednesday, Capt. Russ Davies, a spokesman for the Anne Arundel County fire department, said that an internal investigation is being conducted to examine the dispatcher’s response in this and previous calls. The dispatcher has been transferred to another position. The outcome of the investigation will determine whether it’s a permanent or temporary assignment, Davies says, The Associated Press reports.
“This call, the way that it was handled, does not meet our expectations of how 911 calls should be received and we don’t believe it meets the public’s expectations either,” Davies said.
The contents of the recording were obtained by NBC 4 in Washington and show an operator with the Anne Arundel County Fire Department Communications Division trying to figure out the location of the Sunday night crash in Maryland City on the Baltimore Washington Parkway, The Washington Post reports.
Rick Warrick, 38, and his fiancee, Julia Pearce, 28, were taking his kids to a local establishment at the Arundel Mills mall on Sunday night when their car suffered a flat tire on the parkway. He and his fiancee pulled to the shoulder, got out of the car to change the tire and were struck around 9:15 p.m. The car that hit the couple fled.
Pearce encouraged Warrick to keep breathing but he died at the scene. She suffered two broken legs, a broken pelvis and a fractured skull, NBC Washington reports.
In the recording the frantic girl asks:
“Can y’all please hurry up!”
“Ma’am, stop yelling, I need a location,” the operator says. She tells him they are along I-295.
“OK, 295, that’s good,” the dispatcher says. “We’re located now on a highway. Now that’s a pretty long road,” he says.
Then the girl says two people were struck.
“Ok, let’s stop whining. OK, let’s stop whining. It’s hard to understand you…two people were struck, correct?” the dispatcher said.
When the girl tells the dispatcher that her dad and his fiancee are motionless and lying on the ground, the dispatcher asks to speak to someone else.
“Is there someone else there I can talk to, because it’s so hard…”
Then the girl tells him the only other conscious person is her young brother.
Davies noted that the operator used the wrong choice of words.
“However, what he was attempting to do was to get her attention, to start ascertaining information from her,” he said. “It was pretty clear at that point they didn’t know where they were.”
The situation could have been handled differently, he said.
Employees at the 911 call center are trained on how to deal with frantic callers, calm them down and get information to send the appropriate help their way, Davies said, per The Associated Press. All of them have emergency medical dispatch certifications for this.
When the girl wasn’t able to provide specifics about their location, the emergency responders used the GPS in the teen’s cellphone to track them, so the dispatcher’s handling of the call didn’t impact response time.
The driver who hit the couple hasn’t come forward.
Authorities say that anyone with information can call 202-610-8737.
