Mom dies after 911 call treated as prank

How sad. A 911 dispatcher should *never* treat any call as a prank. Now, this five year old is without a mom.

This dispatcher should be fired! No 911 call can assumed to be a prank. Isn't it better to err on the side of caution?

This dispatcher should be canned immediately. This poor kid. He must have been terrified. Here he was trying to get help for his mother, and not only does she not believe him, she actually threatens him with "being in trouble with the police". What an absolute ignoramous, I swear.

holy @!$%# what an @!$%#!!

now 10 kids are left motherless thanks to that sob :(

This may be the most disturbing part:

The 911 operator remains on the job amid the investigation, Tate said.

Sad.

I hope this kid doesn't have to worry about money ever again. He'll have plenty to deal with. What a shame.

The operator should be charged with professional negligence.

can you imagine how frustrated the kid must have felt on the phone? He must have been raging and confused to hear someone whom we all aught to trust tell him to stop playing around.

Standard procedure (at least in Alabama) is to dispatch an officer anytime someone calls 911. No matter what! We teach our kids how to dial 911 and tell them if there is emergency to call it and this is how we treat him. I just hope as that boy grows older he remembers that he did the right thing and that it was not his fault.

Who on earth does this person think they are to be able to judge whether someone is pranking or not?

Members of the military are held to more strict standards of conduct, right? The Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ). I think that certain civil service positions that involve being trusted with lives should imply responsibility to a certain code with penalties for violations like this egregious one.

That's interesting...

I was under the impression that even if you call 911 and say "Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to deal 911" that they were obligated to dispatch a Police Officer to the location where the call originated. (I've done this on more than one occasion at work.

If the facts are as simple as the article makes them out to be, this would should be fired... at the very least.

Still, it could be that there was a history of prank calls from this house? Even so, it seems like procedure should mandate that the situation be checked out and that the caller be fined... rather than not doing anything at all.

Come on, it's un-logical to say a 5 year old pranks 911? and even then she should have sent out for some kind of help.

Wow, that's so awful.

I hope that the operator has this on his (or her) conscience for the rest of his (or her) life.

I find the whole thing just sad, there's even been a case where a cat got caught in the phone cord and they sent someone out to the house to check things out, why they didn't send someone out right away is beyond me.

I think the first instinct is to blame the dispatcher (and don't get me wrong; I too find it appalling that she was not immediately relieved of her position).

However, giving her the benefit of the doubt and assuming she did not just dismiss his call because that is something she does regularly, she probably did so because people HAVE prank-called 911 in the past. It's the whole boy-who-cried-wolf thing. And that's what really tragic about this whole thing - that there are people out there who take advantage of a system where credibility is so important.

This kid has a rough future ahead of him. He was probably taught in school or by some adult about calling 911 in case of an emergency, and look what it got him. I won't be surprised if he has serious trust issues, or problems with authority in general.

It also struck me that he made not one, but TWO phone calls. He did everything right, and he was totally screwed over. And, according to the article, the police arrived three hours later, meaning he was probably just sitting there with his unconscious or deceased mother for three hours.

Tragic.

i know in the town i reside in police must go to all 9-1-1 calls.

I'm not aware of the law in this regard but to me, this borders on criminal. The DA should be investigating.

Something like this almost happened to me. I fell about 15 feet from the attic of my garage. I wasn't KO-ed, nobody came when I called "Help", so I gathered up my broken arm, managed to stand, walked in the house and asked my daughter, who was 10, to call 911. The operator seemed to reject my daughter as too young, then me because I sounded odd but my daughter phoned my wife and she convinced 911 to send an ambulance. I was pretty banged up but nothing likely to have killed me but I didn't know what was wrong with me, was in shock and it was hard to talk. The part before I realized I couldn't breathe because I was winded wasn't as scary as wondering if I could drive to the hospital with one arm and legs that weren't working very well (no 911 OK, no ambulance here).

You'd think a frightened girl and a guy gasping about having fallen would be fairly compelling.

I think a someone should be dispatched to every single 911 call. If it turns out to be a prank, or a child playing with the phone, then their should be HUGE penalties and fines. It might take the pressure off those operators who are overworked, underpaid, and constantly bothered by stupid people.

My mother-in-law is a 911 operator, she had one lady call to see if she could send a police officer to get her daughter out of bed because she was refusing to go to school!!! Absurd! People need to get some common sense.

Still, this particular case is disheartening and even frightening. I feel for everyone involved.

This is a disgusting example of a person too jaded with their position to care about the human face of their job.

In Australia we have 000 as en equivalent to the American 911, and unfortunately to save money in recent years there has been a consolidation of operator services to one (1) national centre for all calls between 2100 and 0700 each day. This has resulted in ambulance's being sent to a street address in a suburb in the WRONG state (ie: 60 Washington Avenue, Sharon, Kansas instead of 60 Washington Avenue, Sharon, Connecticut). Over the past 18 months this has lead to 2 deaths of people while waiting for medical aide

Wow, thats very disturbing. Knowing s/he is still on the job.

Also remember they are in Detroit.