By Sofia Santana
Sun-Sentinel
Copyright 2008 Sun-Sentinel Company
PLANTATION, Fla. — The 911 operator who handled a call from a woman killed at the police station last month had previously been suspended for using racial slurs at work and admonished for being rude to callers, according to personnel records.
Although Police Chief Larry Massey wanted her fired in May 2007 over the racial slur allegations, Rebecca Prieto was suspended for 10 days without pay and then remained on the job.
On April 25, she answered a 911 call from Olidia Kerr Day, a mother of three who pleaded for help as she was being chased by a gunman who shot her to death outside the Police Department’s lobby.
Day’s family and some emergency services consultants who heard a recording of the 911 call have criticized Prieto’s handling of it. Police officials have said in interviews that Prieto, 28, did nothing wrong.
Prieto declined to comment Thursday, as did police Chief Larry Massey.
“At this particular time I just can’t comment on the disciplinary matters,” he said.
Prieto has several commendations in her file for helping to answer 911 calls during particularly busy shifts, but supervisors also complained that she took too much sick time and leave.
The complaint alleging that Prieto made a racial slur, which led to her suspension, came from one of her supervisors. In that incident, Prieto admitted to using a racial slur while talking to a friend on her cell phone after a patrol officer, via his police radio, requested background information from Prieto on a black man he had pulled over.
Massey decided to approve the suspension instead of firing Prieto because he said he realized that Prieto was not using the word maliciously and acted out of immaturity, according to internal memos.
The city hired Prieto in May 2004 - a month after it turned her down for a job as a 911 operator because of an unfavorable in-person interview. Prieto had worked previously as a flight attendant for American Airlines from December 1999 to June 2003.
The job in Plantation was Prieto’s first as a 911 operator, according to the employment history she filed with the city.
The 911 call involving Prieto and Day is part of the department’s ongoing investigation into Day’s death, at the hands of Carlos Cevallos, 48, of Pembroke Pines. He was an acquaintance and turned the gun on himself after he shot Day, 45.
That evening, minutes before she was killed, Day walked out of her Sunrise Heights house, got into her car and called 911 from a cell phone. She said Cevallos had taken her out of her home at gunpoint and that he was in another car and chasing after her.
At that point, Day, who lived near the Police Department was about a mile away from the station.
A Sunrise 911 operator initially received Day’s 911 call and then transferred it to Plantation’s 911 center, where Prieto picked up.
The Sunrise operator remained on the line, but neither he nor Prieto could trace Day’s cell phone to determine exactly where she was - and Day was too frantic to clearly tell them.
All 911 centers in the region are able to track cell phones, but the technology sometimes is spotty with older cell phones, authorities said.
Day pleaded and screamed into her cell phone for help, for an officer to find her on the street, for the location of the Plantation Police Department. The operators could not provide either of those, including the location of the police station.
Day’s relatives were particularly hurt by the words and tone Prieto used during her attempts to get Day to calm down.
On a recording of the 911 call, Prieto calmly tells telling Day: “Listen. Stop yelling because I can’t help you if you’re yelling.”
Day’s sister, Olga Perez, remembers that line as being among the last words her sister heard.
“She was screaming for help and it was ignored because it was viewed as a domestic dispute,” Perez said Thursday.
Initially, police described the incident as domestic, but later said that they weren’t sure exactly what the relationship between Day and Cevallos was.
Also during the 911 call, Prieto asked Day if she knew the man who was chasing her, how she knew the man and whether Day spoke Spanish.
Michael Loiz, a public safety consultant and veteran paramedic in Connecticut hired by the South Florida Sun-Sentinel to analyze the latest 911 recording, thought Prieto wasted precious seconds with those questions.
Robert Krause, an emergency services consultant in Toledo, Ohio, thought Prieto should have told Day to keep driving, realizing Day would have been in danger if she stopped the car.
The extra advice, though, might not have saved Day’s life, those same experts said.
Staff writer Brian Haas contributed to this report.