Ghosts of the Emergency Line

This guy shot his wife after he found her cheating.

He was hysterical and scared shitless about what he had just done.

He put down the phone and there was another gunshot.

He killed himself and I heard it.

His wife was still alive, and she was screaming that she forgave him over and over and that they were going to get through it.

It was fucked.

She survived.

So, there's a little bright.

Add to the story.

I had one person call in screaming about a guy getting beat to death in her front yard with the sounds of aluminium bats.

Ringing in the background.

I had to help a maybe 12-year-old boy start.

CPR on his mother, who had attempted suicide on the fourth of July, a couple of years back.

She died and that's never left me.

I got a call from a guy saying he was sitting in his car with a shotgun and was going to kill himself.

He seemed very calm, and I could tell in his voice that he had made up his mind and this wasn't a cry for help.

Like most of the other suicide calls I receive.

He told me he was at one of our trains stations but wouldn't tell me which one.

So, while I had officers out looking for him.

I made small talk with him about his family and sports.

I even had him laugh a few times.

After about 10 minutes of talking and me thinking I made progress, he finally said Well, it's been nice talking to you, but I got to get going.

He then proceeded to put the gun in his mouth and pull the trigger.

I heard his death gurgles.

I've had a lot of messed-up calls as a 911 operator.

The one I had this lady was screaming, just horrific screaming.

Then the phone went dead.

I called back only to hear that horrific screaming again.

Then I heard someone else in the background screaming.

He's stabbing her.

He's stabbing her.

She died.

The culprit did get caught by an officer.

I had dispatched.

She literally jumped off a car roof and landed on top of the guy.

Not sure what his sentence was.

I had another guy who drowned his two-year-old son.

That fucked me up for a while because I was pregnant with my son at the time.

I kept thinking how unfair it was that some child could be so terrified as the one person he trusted.

And loved was harming him.

Not only that but when you drown your conscious to the end.

I still cry for that.

Little boy, some days.

I had another man who was changing the oil in his SUV, long story short, the SUV fell on him, and he died before.

Help got there.

There were a lot of calls like that where you're the last person to ever talk to someone.

I knew as soon as I heard his breath go agonal, he was done.

I was a year into the job in a pretty large town with Woods all around it.

I got a call from a young man who identified himself as 21 years old.

He said he went on a hike with his best friend, and this is where it got weird.

I asked for his location, and it was about 50 miles from the nearest Railhead but not in the direction, the trails move.

I asked him to tell me what the problem was and what services he needed when he burst into tears.

Saying one moment.

His friend was in front of him and the next he was gone.

I dispatched the sheriff and was told that neither man was ever found.

It still freaks me out.

I'm not allowed to give exact details, but one of my worst calls was from a little boy.

I think he was about five.

He was hiding in his closet because his dad was drunk and beating the ever-loving shit out of his mom.

He lived in a very rural area, and it was about an hour's drive from the nearest police Detachment.

I stayed on the phone with him for almost 45 minutes, the guys drive fast when there are kids involved trying to keep him calm.

You literally talk about anything that pops into your head.

The weather's favourite TV shows what his favourite toys are all the while.

You can plainly hear a woman screaming and crying in the background, and as the call goes on, you can still hear the guy beating her, but her screams turn into Grunts.

And moans.

You can't tune it out because you're constantly typing.

What, you hear any details?

You can get it from the background.

So, valuable to the officers attending.

Anyway, the members arrived and arrested the piece of shit, and once I hung out, they had the kids safe and then the phone rang again because there was no stopping.

There's no time to process what just happened, and honestly, it's probably for the best.

A lot of the time you don't find out the outcome of the call because as I said, there are always more phones, ringing.

My worst call was a child who died in a hot car.

This was not a case where a parent went shopping and left a baby in the car for some time.

On a summer day.

It was not someone who admitted, they forgot their child.

In the back seat.

This was a child old enough to walk.

Talk turns the car on and off.

If are needed, hang out and read a book or go inside to cool off.

The parent had restrained the child in an SUV.

So, none of these things could be done and did not check on the child for several hours.

It was a few more hours before the parent told anyone the child had died.

I got a call from a woman who was depressed and suicidal.

She called from a disconnected cell phone and refused to give me her location.

I never got a ping on her, but it was an apartment complex and there wasn't much I could do for that.

She refused to let me send anyone to her and refused to talk to EMS suicide, hotlines, or supervisors.

I answer the phone.

So, I was the only one she would talk to.

We talked for a really long time, not just relative to my normal calls of a couple minutes.

I need around two hours of my life was spent trying to talk her out of it.

She ingested a large quantity of Narcotics and alcohol.

I remember her telling me her husband's name was David and they were recently divorced.

She had the narcotics for pain because she was involved in an Auto accident, not too long before.

All of this.

She was unable to work in extreme pain and considering the recent divorce.

It's easy to see why she felt the way she did.

The youngest son had just moved away from home as well.

I felt really bad for her.

I had a call from a frantic father who was yelling that his 14-month-old son wasn't breathing.

The boys somehow got outside and fell into the pool at minimum.

He was underwater for a few minutes.

I start giving CPR instructions over the phone.

I'm trying my best to calm the father enough to listen to me to start compressions.

One of our officers gets there and takes over CPR.

The fire department got there, shortly after.

I've done CPR over a dozen times as a former EMT.

I've done a few over the phone, but never for a child as young as this kid.

I couldn't hang up the father kept the Line open, and I kept listening.

I heard the compressions.

I heard the life pack charging up.

I heard the shock and then I heard silence.

After a few minutes.

The EMT is loaded up.

And go, I could hear the parents crying blaming themselves for killing their own baby.

The Medics were able to get a pulse just before calling it.

The NICU tried their best, but the child passed 24 hours later.

I did three years behind the phone and never had a call.

Hit me so hard.

I took my break early that night.

I got a call for two children trapped in a house.

Fire mom and the family ran out of the house.

Leaving the kids inside.

The fire had engulfed, the home, and was blowing out the windows throughout the entire first floor, the mother called 911.

And I filled it, her call.

I could hear the panic and despair in her voice, the screams, the pounding on the door that had locked behind them when they ran out of the house.

The screams of pain are someone is being burned while trying to get back into a fire-filled house.

I heard the urgency and the voice of those firefighters and police as they finally found the bodies and rushed them to the hospital, knowing that there was nothing more that could be done.

While on the phone with the screaming hysterical.

Mother was hard to do.

I wanted to drive there and help to I wanted to cry right with her.

I wanted to yell and scream and ask whatever God why?

But I had to be ready for the next call.

I was dispatching an alarm for an unresponsive elderly male.

I got the paramedic First Responders there and then the ambulance shortly after they confirmed that the guy was dead.

Literally a minute.

After that.

I heard the voice of the paramedic, come over a demanding a second ambulance, but after that, I couldn't get a hold of him.

I assume that one of the family members of the man had died either.

Had a heart attack or fainted at the news of the death.

I got a second ambulance dispatch there, very shortly and I heard from someone else at the fire department.

HQ worked out of that.

It was the paramedic who went down turns out.

He had a heart attack and died in the ambulance.

It was very sad and very eerie for me to hear especially after someone also told me that his last words were spoken to me over the radio.

Back when I first started, there was only one dispatcher on duty for a 12-hour shift.

I took a call from a woman that had just been raped and beaten down on the street from the police department.

She worked at a convenience store and her attacker had smashed a monitor over her head before leaving.

I had to put her on, hold to answer the other phone line.

It was her manager after he walked in on the aftermath.

He went next door.

The gas station then called the police.

I felt horrible that I had to put her on hold, then rage at the manager for leaving her and thereby making me put her on hold too. the suicide sticks with me the most Here are a few.

The first one was less than a year on at the job.

I got a call from a female who sounded numb, such as came home from work and found her fiancé hanging from the rafters.

She kept asking me what I do now.

I had no answer for her just kept repeating that I would stay on the line with her until help showed up another one.

I got a call from a female.

Who said she just found her friend's boyfriend hanging from a tree out back and that her friend's kids were sleeping inside could we please hurry?

So, they don't have to see him in the backyard.

Another one was a call from a hysterical man who was yelling at his adult sister in her 40s.

I think just shot herself in the head in front of their extended family.

The reason I bring up his sex is that he sounded like a female, and I kept calling him ma'am.

When asking for him to take a breath so that I could get the info.

I needed.

I know some dispatchers won't say Sir or ma'am, but that's how I was brought up when he yelled that.

He was a man.

I just switched to sir and kept trying to calm him down to get the info.

This one was not a suicide, but an o.d. and it always stuck with me as well.

I got a call, but no one answered me until I heard an older female voice close by crying and saying please don't leave me, please.

Don't leave me and the sounds of the Fallen brushing up against the fabric.

Then the line disconnects.

My first thought was that this was some sort of domestic violence call.

I called back and immediately, got the female on the line.

Who said she found her adult Son, dead from a heroin overdose two instances immediately.

Jump to my mind one was an old guy whose wife called because he was having a very hard time breathing.

I was asking her questions.

She insisted on giving him the phone for some reason.

He wheezed a few answers to me before the paramedics got there.

They pronounced him about five minutes later.

I still think about how I was the last one he ever spoke to on the phone, and maybe the last one he spoke to period.

The second one was when I was still in training.

We sent firefighters to a house fire.

That was out in the country.

It was the boonies so it took them a few minutes to get there.

They found a man who had gotten out of the house, but his kids were still inside, and he was trying to get back into the burning house.

They spent time, fighting him, and then police officers showed up, and he fought them as well.

Both of the kids who had been playing with a lighter died in the fire.

This one was a domestic disturbance, a woman locked herself in the bathroom.

Her husband is on the other side of the door with a gun.

He had barricaded himself inside the house, and all my guys were in a standoff that poor woman was terrified.

Every time he started, banging on that door.

I just knew he was going to break through and get her.

The standoff lasted at least an hour, but they got him alive.

I got a call from a hysterical elderly female.

She had just woken up and found her 78-year-old husband unresponsive.

I get the priority information and ask if he is cool to the touch and she begins panicking, even more yelling.

Uncontrollably.

I bring her back and start providing CPR instructions.

Keep in mind that as soon as I have a general assessment of what kind of emergency I'm dealing with and confirm the caller's location.

The appropriate units, get dispatched, our workstations consist of two PCs, the PBX phone system, and a dispatch terminal, the county maintains, a database of all the valid residential addresses that would pre-populate on the dispatch terminal.

The local phone companies maintained their customer caller records that would be displayed on the PBX PC because time is of the essence during emergencies.

Whatever can be made more efficient, and quicker is There's a key.

You could hit and transfer the address information from the caller ID, / PB X PC to the dispatch terminal, which would shave seconds off.

Of the call start to dispatch times.

If someone called, and the address was not yet available on the county database, the system would attempt to find the closest match.

We're now approaching the 9-minute.

Mark and I start to get that.

So, I look at the map and they are not that far.

Away from the fire station.

The First Responders should have already been there by this point.

She's given up on the CPR exhausted.

I turn the secondary speaker to the fire radio frequency just in, time to catch the paramedic on the ambulance request from her dispatcher radio.

Can you have the call or confirm the address?

We're out of the address you provided and there's no emergency here.

My heart sank.

I interrupt my collar devastating saw by asking her ma'am.

I just wanted to confirm that you're at such and such a dress.

It was at this point that I realized what I had done, the caller ID information matched, exactly what was transferred to the dispatch terminal with one exception.

Road does not drive.

I ended up sending an ambulance to the wrong address because of my lapse in judgment.

The caller's address was not in the county database, but the closest match was, and it was located on the opposite side of the county.

I could have sworn they matched before.

I sent the call over to be dispatched.

I swear 100%.

As soon as I realized my error.

I corrected the address and dispatched the correct units.

I hang up the phone at 7:02, a.m.

When EMS arrived on the scene, 17 minutes after she woke up and called me for help.

I still feel like that slight lapse in judgment.

On my part was the reason someone died.

As soon as I made it into my car, I lost it.

I killed him me.

The next shift.

Everyone saw how much of a toll it took on me.

Everyone offered words of encouragement saying how there wasn't anything I could have done that.

He was 78 blah blah blah that day.

I got my first official; corrective action being written up for failing to confirm the caller's location.

My first official fuck up and over six years.

I became afraid of the phone and would drag myself and be the last one to answer.

I quit.

Two days later.

I took a public safety dispatcher class for post-cert.

The class is taught by a current dispatcher.

The teacher played one for us that I won't forget.

It was an old woman on the phone who was calling to report someone creeping around in the backyard.

She asks the units to hurry.

The dispatcher says police are on their way but won't be there for five minutes.

As the lady is saying the address she gets attacked and lets out this scream, that sounds like a dying animal combined with the worst fear you've ever heard in your life.

Then it's silent gone.

The phones are on.

You can hear someone moving shit around.

Police spent four hours looking for that woman's house.

The dispatcher got the address wrong.

It was an example of how important it is to ask for a clear address first.

I will never forget that dead woman's scream.

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