By Brianne Dopart
The Herald-Sun (Durham, NC)
Copyright 2007 The Durham Herald Co.
At least six minutes passed between the time a distraught mother called 911 to report her two daughters had been shot and the time emergency medical personnel arrived at the scene, according to Durham police records.
In a 911 recording made public Wednesday, Drusilla Wardlow, mother of 14-year-old shooting victim Tavisa Cartnail, begs dispatchers to send help for more than five minutes before passing the phone to an unidentified man.
In another recording, made minutes earlier, a dispatcher can be heard arguing with a woman calling to report a man shouting curse words and firing a gun wildly at Taylor and North Driver streets. Police are dispatched a minute and two seconds into that woman’s panicked call.
Cartnail died near her home on Fidelity Drive as a result of Sunday’s shooting at the North Driver and Taylor intersection. Her half-sister, Naqweeta Wardlow, was wounded but survived.
Jim Soukup, director of the 911 system, said his staff handled the calls to the best of their ability.
In one recording, two minutes into Wardlow’s call, the dispatcher continues to ask her where her daughters were shot.
911 dispatcher: “Ma’am, please, please try to calm down. Where were they shot?”
Drusilla Wardlow: “My baby was shot in the head.”
911: “Shot in the head?”
DW: “Yes!”
911: “OK, OK, OK. Is there more than one wound?”
DW: “Yes! Please come on!”
911: “Ma’am the ambulance is coming! Is there more than one wound?”
DW: “Yes! Yes! Yes!”
911: “OK and when did this happen?”
DW: “She’s laying on the ground. She ain’t got no pulse.”
Soukup said dispatchers are forceful in their attempts to get information so they can pass that information along to police and emergency medical personnel.
Dispatch logs made public Wednesday show it took nearly three minutes from the time Wardlow called and declared her daughter had been shot and the time EMS was dispatched.
The ambulance took more than five minutes to arrive at the Fidelity Drive home of the teen victims -- a lag Soukup said may have been because of the time it took Durham police to “secure the scene,” which he described as the area where the shooting took place to the area where Cartnail eventually died.
He said that was to ensure the safety of the emergency responders.
Fidelity Drive, where Cartnail lay dying while her mother called 911, is more than a mile’s drive from Taylor and North Driver streets.
Police did not respond Wednesday to questions about officers securing the shooting scene.
Three minutes into her call and just seconds after emergency personnel were officially on their way, Wardlow could be heard sobbing and begging her daughter, whom she called “Ty,” to hang on to her life.
DW: “OK, OK, Ty, I’m right here. It’s OK, baby, I know. Please. It’s OK. Please Ty. I need you to fight.”
It was after Wardlow handed the phone to a man more than four minutes into her call that a dispatcher told family members to wrap a cloth around the child’s wounds. More than six minutes after Drusilla Wardlow called 911, the man to whom she handed the phone hung up.
Back at Taylor and North Driver streets, Diane Winstead had reported a man yelling and shooting “every which way.” She said she had her own problems trying to call for help.
After telling the dispatcher her address and before she could explain what she later told reporters she had witnessed from the bay window of her North Driver Street home, the dispatcher cut her off and asked for her address again.
Winstead: “Please have the cops come over here fast to 313 N. Driver St. There is a guy over on this road ...”
911 dispatcher: “OK, ma’am. Please calm down. What is the address?”
DW: “Let me tell you first, OK? There was a guy with a gun ...”
911: “I cannot send them out -- I cannot send them out if I don’t have the correct address. Please give me the address.”
DW: “I just said, 313 N. Driver St. in Durham! That’s where y’all are at? In Durham, right?”
911: “What is the phone number that you’re calling from, ma’am?”
The dispatcher issued the call to police 62 seconds after receiving the call. Soukup said that’s the standard time it takes for help to be dispatched.
While the dispatch log indicates police arrived at the same time they were dispatched, the recording of Winstead’s call was three minutes long, and it was not until the very end of the call that she could be heard saying police had arrived.
Winstead said dispatchers should listen and be empathetic, not argumentative.
“When we tell them what we need them to do they should do it, and then worry about taking the address,” Winstead said. “A police officer told me they already had my address. I still don’t understand why [the dispatcher] needed it again.”
Soukup said the dispatcher needed to be “forceful” to obtain the information necessary for police to handle the situation appropriately.
He said he routinely directs dispatchers to get as much information as possible from callers because “you’ll never know what can make the difference” to law enforcement, he said.