HENCH, DAVID, Portland Press Herald

State and county officials say a miscommunication among dispatchers delayed the state police’s response to the death of a child who was hit by his father’s plow in Greene on Wednesday. Officials said the delay did not have any impact on the medical response.

Six-year-old Nathan Capponi was playing on his scooter in the driveway when he was hit by a plow driven by his father, Kevin Capponi, 36, who was cleaning up after the previous day’s snowstorm.

The State Medical Examiner’s office said Friday the boy died of accidental blunt force trauma to the head.

An Androscoggin County dispatcher took the initial call at 6:45 a.m. and summoned an ambulance and the local fire department. The ambulance covered the distance from Lewiston to the far side of Greene in 13 minutes, said Capt. Raymond Lafrance, director of public safety for the Androscoggin Sheriff’s Office.

The dispatcher quickly notified the state’s regional communications center in Gray, which dispatches state police troopers. A dispatcher there, who was new to the job, asked if law enforcement help was needed, according to Lt. Walter Grzyb, head of State Police Troop B, who listened to the tape. “The dispatcher in Androscoggin kind of paused, said ‘Well, they’re not asking for it at this time,’ ” Grzyb said.

“For whatever reason, they didn’t understand a police response was probably required,” he said. “We all know how serious it is now. The initial calls didn’t say ‘The child’s going to die,’ just that a child has been injured in his driveway by a father plowing.”

Grzyb said his troopers did not learn about the fatal accident until notified by the state medical examiner at about 9 a.m.

“He was kind of horrified that he didn’t know about this incident,” Grzyb said of the trooper. “In this case, it didn’t have any impact on the investigation. The outcome didn’t impact us in terms of what we were doing in terms of scene evaluation or examination.”

Lafrance said his dispatchers made the transfer to the state communications center as they normally would.

“The important people got there really quick. EMS is the number one priority — life and safety. The fire department and the ambulance were dispatched in less than a minute and were en route,” Lafrance said.

“I think there was a miscommunication on their end,” he said. “They (county dispatch) told (state dispatch) that the father had backed up and struck the child and that they were giving them a heads up.”

A second call to Gray said that an ambulance had arrived and CPR had been started, indicating the severity of the incident, but that call went to a different dispatcher.

Clifford Wells, director of the state’s Emergency Services Communications Bureau, said the agency would study the incident to determine whether any policy or training issues need to be addressed.

Wells said different towns have different policies on when to dispatch police to an accident.

He also said that because state police and the sheriff’s office cover Greene on alternating months, the new dispatcher might have believed the county had sent one of its units, he said.

The new dispatcher has been on the staff for a few months.

Grzyb said the mixup was unrelated to the patrol arrangement in Greene, which calls for the state police to patrol that town and two others every other month, with the sheriff’s office providing coverage in the alternating months.

Troopers do not typically monitor radio traffic between the county communications center and fire and rescue departments, Grzyb said.

Copyright © 2013 LexisNexis, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All Rights Reserved.