Six-Year-Old 911 Caller Considered Prankster; Mother Dies

Via Chris Howard, this story is just terrible.

Robert Turner called 911 to get help for his mother, Sherel Turner, 46, whom he found lying unconscious on the kitchen floor of their Detroit apartment…

"Then I had felt her tummy. She wasn't breathing. Then I had called 911," said Robert. "I told them to send an emergency truck right now."

911 Operator: "911. What's the problem?"

Robert: "My mom has passed out."

The 911 operator, however, did not take him seriously and told him to stop playing on the phone, the station reported.

911 Operator: "Where's the grownups at?"

Robert: (Inaudible)

911 Operator: "Let me speak to her before I send the police over there."

"I tried to tell them she wouldn't talk," said Robert.

Robert: (Inaudible)

911 Operator: "I don't care. You shouldn't be playing on the phone. Now put her on the phone before I send the police out there to knock on the door and you gonna be in trouble."

Robert: "Ugh!" (Hangs up.)

Kimberly Harris, the union president of AFSCME Local 1023, said more than a quarter of phone calls received by 911 operators are prank calls.

More than a quarter are prank calls?! Okay, first of all, the operator who didn’t treat this brilliant little kid’s call seriously is an idiot and a half whose idiocy left a little boy motherless (and from that partial transcript I see no reason why anyone would automatically assume it’s a prank), but who are the fucking assholes who are making prank calls to 911?! My first reaction was to wonder since when don’t the police check out any and every emergency call, but if over 25% of them are pranks, that’s a lot of wasted resources in a city where cops are needed for real emergencies. That means 911 operators have no second chance; they have to get it right the first time.

This also reminds me of the time that I looked out my window and saw a building on fire. I called 911, and the operator who picked up said, before I even uttered a word, “Yeah, we know about the fire,” and hung up on me. I guess he didn’t think that any rapes, murders, or burglaries take place in Chicago when there’s a fire going on.