Denver health officials say minutes can make the difference

By Jared Jacang Maher
Denver Westword
Copyright 2008 Village Voice Media

DENVER — Michael Hancock got the call at 6:30 a.m.: His sister had been shot. Hancock lived less than five minutes away, and when he screeched to a halt on a quiet neighborhood street in Montbello, he saw his sister, 41-year-old Karen West, in the driver's seat of her SUV.

"I walked right up to my sister and heard her grunting for life," Hancock remembers. In the seat next to West was the body of her common-law husband, who had apparently shot West, the mother of two teenagers, in the head before turning the gun on himself. Police officers arrived just after he did; they told him that he had to step outside the perimeter until medical help came. Denver firefighters from the nearby station showed up less than a minute later, but they were trained only in Basic Life Support skills, such as CPR, and weren't equipped to staunch West's significant bleeding or transport her to the hospital.

"They said, 'There's nothing we can do,'" Hancock recalls. "'We need the ambulance service.'" By then, at least six or seven minutes had passed since the original 911 call. He and other family members stood by anxiously, waiting for the paramedics as the minutes ticked away. "It felt like an extra twenty minutes. It could have been ten minutes or fifteen minutes," he says. "But it felt like an eternity waiting for someone to get there to help my sister."

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