By John Davis
The Sarasota Herald Tribune
NORTH PORT, Fla. — The police dispatcher fired for failing to send help to a crash victim who was found dead hours later is getting her job back, along with a year’s back pay.
Nadia Kashitskaya will receive a letter of reprimand as discipline, after an outside arbitrator found the North Port Police Department’s firing was too harsh.
Protections in the union contract saved Kashitkaya’s job after arbitrator Irwin Socoloff concluded the city was inconsistent in punishing operator errors. He cited similar mistakes by another call taker who kept her job with North Port.
No one was hurt in that incident, and it did not receive the intense media scrutiny of the Kashitskaya case.
Interim City Manager Terry Lewis, who as police chief fired Kashitskaya, stood by the termination on Tuesday, but said the city would not appeal Socoloff’s decision to circuit court.
“That’s one man’s opinion,” he said. “And I don’t agree with it, but we will respect the process and respect the decision.”
Mark Minisci Jr. of North Port called 911 shortly before midnight Dec. 11, 2009, telling the operator that a man was outside a truck in a heavily wooded section of the city north of Interstate 75. His call was forwarded to Kashitskaya in North Port.
Minisci could not remember the exact name of the street where the caller saw the man, so Kashitskaya did not send an officer to check.
This left Brian Wood, 55, of Port Charlotte, lying in the road for 19 hours.
His body was found the next day, after someone else called 911 a second time about the man outside the truck.
An autopsy found fatal levels of cocaine, oxycodone and alcohol in Wood’s body, but was inconclusive as to whether he could have been alive when Minisci called 911.
The medical examiner found that Wood likely did not die from crash injuries. He reportedly had a small cut on his forehead, but no neck or head trauma or significant blood loss from the crash into a power pole.
Investigators found evidence that Wood got out of the truck and walked around before falling to the ground.
The emergency response failure was especially embarrassing in North Port, which lobbied for 911 reform statewide after a mishandled call in Charlotte County hampered efforts in the January 2008 abduction and murder of city resident Denise Lee.
Lee’s case became a rallying point for 911 reform, including standardized training statewide.
After Kashitskaya’s firing, Lewis called for an outside review of the city’s 911 policies, prompting additional training for dispatchers.
North Port Police found that Kashitskaya violated policy by failing to gather basic information from Minisci and was negligent in her duties for not sending an officer to meet Minisci or go to the area he had called about.
Socoloff cited a similar case in January in which North Port 911 operator Mandy West failed to gather basics from a woman who said her 13-year-old son had been missing for eight hours. The boy was found unharmed, and West received a written reprimand but kept her job.
Kashitakaya and the union, the Southwest Florida Police Benevolent Association, appealed the firing internally before taking it to an arbitrator, as outlined in the police contract.
The appeal led to an August hearing before Socoloff.
“Kashitskaya, to her knowledge, was dealing, only, with someone ‘outside his truck,’ as reported by a calm individual,” wrote Socoloff in his decision. “West was faced with the situation of a juvenile who had been missing all night. The potential for tragic results, was, seemingly, far greater in the West case. Yet, the Kashitskaya case was assigned to a type of investigation often leading to serious discipline while the West matter was referred to a much-lesser-type investigation.”
Monday’s decision closes the Kashitskaya case. She will return to work and receive back pay of her $32,000 annual salary going back to last year.
“Nadia had a perfect record,” said Diane Bailey Morton, Kashitkaya’s attorney. “She had no prior disciplines. She had excellent verbal evaluations and a written evaluation we put into evidence, and on the night that it happened two supervisors told her it was not a career-ender, that everything would be all right. So I think the arbitrator was correct that it was just the press attention was the differing factor in terms of the decision about discipline, which is not in the employee’s control.”
Lewis defended his decision to fire Kashitkaya.
“The public lack of confidence in the 911 system is real,” Lewis said. “And that was caused by the media attention and appropriate media attention. But I didn’t make my decision on how it would play in the media. I made it on what I thought was the right thing to do.”
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