Hello, 911? My Father is Laying Dying on the Street After Hit-and-Run!; 911: 'Stop Whining!'

A 911 dispatcher has "reassigned" after he told an emotional 13-year-old girl to "stop whining" as her father lay dying after a hit-and-run. The 911 call came in Sunday after a car hit Rick Warrick, 38, of Washington, DC, and his fiancee as they changed a tire on a highway about halfway between Washington and Baltimore. The driver of the car that hit the couple fled. No arrests have been made, and police say they have no description of the car. Rick was killed and his is fiancee, Julia Pearce, 28, was seriously injured but was in fair condition at Baltimore's Shock Trauma Center on Thursday. The man's 13-year-old daughter, who was in the back seat with her younger brother, called 911. In the call, the girl answers many of the 911 dispatcher's questions but struggles at times to remain calm. At one point, the dispatcher interrupts her. "OK, let's stop whining. Let's stop whining, it's hard to understand you," he says. The dispatcher sounds frustrated when the girl asks him to send help quickly. At one point he asks if there's someone else he can talk to. The dispatcher also questions the girl repeatedly about why her father is lying on top of his fiancee, to which she tearfully responds that it's just how he landed. She tells him that her father was breathing but not conscious. The dispatcher doesn't ask the girl how old she is and calls her "ma'am." The captain of the fire department says "911 dispatchers are trained to take control when they have a hysterical caller to focus them, but how (the dispatcher) proceeded to do that doesn't meet our expectations of how that would occur, and we're going to presume the public feels the same way. That's not how they expect to be treated when calling 911 in an emergency like that." Terrible.


source: WCVB