By Eva Ruth Moravec
The San Antonio Express-News
SAN ANTONIO — San Antonio Fire Department officials are reviewing whether emergency personnel responding to a traffic accident last week presumed a pedestrian was dead before they discovered she had a faint pulse.
“The incident is being reviewed right now to make sure the proper procedures were followed,” department spokeswoman Melissa Sparks said about Friday’s accident. “It’s too early in the investigation to determine exactly what happened.”
It wasn’t immediately clear if paramedics checked vital signs upon arrival, as prescribed in the Fire Department’s standard operating procedures.
Last year, paramedics were disciplined after an investigation of a 2007 accident showed that a crash victim was mistakenly presumed dead and died the next day.
On Friday, Alicia Trinidad, 56, was struck by a Ford pickup driven by Ruben Rojas, 37, just after 5 p.m. as she walked across Gillette Boulevard toting freshly made tamales she planned to sell. A San Antonio Police Department report states Rojas failed to yield right of way to Trinidad, who used a crosswalk at Moursund and Gillette boulevards. Rojas has not been charged.
Trinidad had just left her oldest daughter’s home in the 300 block of Gillette, where she lived with her daughter and son-in-law and their four children. She frequently walked to the intersection to catch a bus, said daughter Cindy Trinidad, 35, who came upon the crash on her way to pick up her husband from work.
“About five minutes after she left, I drove down the street and saw the commotion,” she said. “I saw the blue bag that she was carrying on the ground, and immediately, I knew it was her.”
She said that when she got to the scene, someone approached and told her it was too late. Her mother was lying on the pavement in the intersection with severe head trauma.
“I began hysterically crying, and they covered her with a yellow tarp,” Cindy Trinidad said. “Then, a few minutes later, someone told me they found a pulse and they uncovered her.”
A spokesman for the San Antonio Professional Firefighters Association said the union is aware of the incident and is conducting its own investigation.
According to the police report, Alicia Trinidad was flown to University Hospital at 5:15 p.m. Less than an hour later, a doctor pronounced her dead.
“Are there questions in this situation? Yes, there may be some. We’ll never know what might have happened,” Cindy Trinidad said.
In December 2007, a paramedic concluded that Erica Nicole Smith, 23, was dead at the scene of a head-on collision. She was left in the crashed car and covered with a yellow tarp for more than an hour before a medical examiner at the scene noticed she was breathing. Smith was hospitalized and died the next day.
City Attorney Michael Bernard later said that checking for vital signs, which the paramedic failed to do in Smith’s case, is part of the Fire Department’s protocol.
While officials investigate what happened Friday, the Trinidads are wondering how they will cope with their first Christmas without their mother and grandmother.
“That night, we made tamales to sell, but our tradition is to make tamales for the family on Christmas Day,” Cindy Trinidad said.
“She (Alicia Trinidad) would always head that up, and she left without giving me the recipe.”
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