Emergency services operators are trained to deal with people in hysterics so they can assess the situation and dispatch the right emergency services, but it seems not everyone got the memo on compassion.
A 911 operator was ‘reassigned’ after telling a girl to ‘stop whining’ while she was calling in an emergency that involved both her parents getting hit by a car. The hit-and-run driver struck as the parents were changing a flat tyre on their 2007 Hyundai Sonata.
“Let’s stop whining, okay, let’s stop whining. It is hard to understand you,” the operator can be heard saying. “Two people were struck, and they are breathing?” He goes on to ask in an aggressive manner: “Is there someone else there I can talk to?”
38-year-old Rick Warrick later died but his 28-year-old fiancée Julia Pearce survived the incident, which took place on the Baltimore-Washington Parkway in the state of Maryland in the US.
The phone call was reportedly obtained by Pat Collins of News4. ABC2 later published its news report on YouTube.
An official for the Anne Arundel County Fire Department admitted a ‘better choice’ of words could have been used by the operator, who is now in a position ‘where he won’t have citizen contact’.
“However, what he was attempting to do was to get her attention, to start ascertaining information from herIt was pretty clear at that point they didn’t know where they were,” the official added.
The driver of the hit-and-run car is yet to come forward. Local police are asking anyone with information on the incident to get in touch.
Leave a Reply