Editor Spends Night Hearing Redlands 9-1-1 Calls
Toni Momberger, Staff Writer, Redlands Daily Facts (California)
April 20, 2013 Saturday
I did a ride-along with Redlands’ 911 dispatch operators because it’s Disptacher Appreciation Week. This was Carl Baker’s idea.
I showed up at about 8 p.m. on a Friday after I got off work at the Facts. A man named Matthew Magdaleno led me to two women in a dark room, and he returned to his station. There was no time for introductions. Something was going down.
They spared half a second to point to an empty seat between them with a glance of apology and kept at their business.
A 15-year-old boy was hiding in the bathroom of his home while on the phone with the woman on my left, whom I learned later was Vicki Stansell. The boy had been home alone when he saw two men in his yard, then there was the sound of breaking glass and people walking around inside his house.
Presently, officers had just arrived and were entering the home. The woman on the right, Valerie Fury, had them on her headset.
The women’s faces were lit by screens forming bays around them. Fury showed me a screen that showed a bird’s eye view of the neighborhood the boy was calling from. She pointed out little moving symbols – the officers.
Suddenly Stansell burst out in curses. She got disconnected from the boy.
Officers were telling Fury the house seemed clear. At this moment Fury’s headset battery died. Man oh man. Stansell dialed the boy back. No answer. We were at the 23-minute mark from when the call came in.
Meanwhile, a helicopter was above the house shining its light, so calls were coming in from neighbors asking what was going on.
In the Redlands Police Department, all the phone numbers go to the same person. Stansell has four 911 lines, two alternate emergency lines (793-1911) and two non-emergency lines (798-7681). No matter what you dial, Stansell answers (or whoever is working).
She said she’ll often be on an emergency 911 call and someone waiting on a non-emergency line will hang up and call back, maybe thinking he’ll get a different operator or was forgotten. This forces her to put 911 on hold.
Officers were telling Fury they found a car hidden in a grove area near the house they had just searched. The boy identified it as the car the guys had been in. The dispatchers looked at each other with wide eyes. What? He had seen the car? That would have been useful to know earlier.
Plain-clothes officers sat in hiding and waited for the two men to return to it.
Fury used the break in excitement to get me a headset so I could hear everything.
Meanwhile Stansell’s lines were chirping.
“911 what are you reporting? ”
I heard the caller reporting a possible drunken driver on Texas and Redlands Boulevard in a white Benz. Then I heard Magdaleno call out from his desk, “I see him. He’s drifting from lane to lane. ”
I had forgotten about him. I pulled off my headset and ran over to see what he was looking at. He, too, was in a bay of screens, but they were security camera views, 12 per screen, Brady-Bunch style.
He turned a camera to stay on the Benz as it proceeded down the boulevard. Then he switched screens twice to keep it in view as it drove through town.
“He just pulled into AM/PM. He’s asking for directions,” he called to the ladies. I ran back to my seat between them and put my headset back on. Magdaleno was still calling out narrative, but we could see what he was seeing on screens between the dispatchers’ bays. “Now he’s westbound on Citrus. ”
Fury had an officer in her ear as the Benz was pulled over. “He was just lost,” she reported.
Stansell took another call. She types the specifics into one of her screens – she has a whole set of mouses – and repeats things to the caller so Fury can see and hear what she needs to say to an officer. They are listening to three things at once while typing and looking at multiple monitors.
Stansell’s headset battery went dead.
As soon as she got it going it again it rang. A woman’s son’s girlfriend had called the woman to say the man was high and acting strange. There was panic.
While Stansell was typing up the key details, Fury said, “Oh there he is.” She had his picture up on one of her screens. He was a felon, for theft. She had all kinds of facts about him to share as she dispatched an officer.
Stansell has been doing this since 1984, for RPD since 1988. She told me how many days to her retirement in July 2014.
I asked them to tell me about the calls that haunt them when they try to sleep.
They both spoke at once.
Stansell: I’ve never in my career had an officer involved shooting.
Fury: An officer involved shooting is my worst nightmare.
“The Dorner shooting touched close to home,” Stansell said. “My husband is a captain. ”
“Props to that dispatcher, though, did you hear the tape?” Fury said. “She did such a good job. ”
I hear the emotion in the women’s voices.
“It came over the air, ‘All units, two officers down,'” Stansell said. “You never hear a double 1199. We were like, did they just say that? ”
I asked what the dispatcher had done right.
“She kept calm,” Fury said. “Her voice was straight. You know she was scared. I have it here,” she started clicking through one of her screens with one of her many mouses. “You hear ‘Officer down,’ and she said, ‘Copy, officer down.’ ”
Just then both women’s lines rang simultaneously.
On the one I was listening to, we learned someone in the Jack in the Box parking lot was scaring the customers. We zoomed in on him immediately and put his image on its own screen while Stansell got information from the caller. Within seconds we watched an officer approach him. Fury’s screen was showing what Stansell was typing and she dispatched a nearby officer while listening to her own caller.
We were taking police calls. 911 is also the number to call for fire or medical emergencies, but we were transferring them to a larger call center in Rialto.
Sometimes all the lines ring at once.
“Every accident on the freeway generates multiple 911 calls,” Stansell said. “There are only four 911 lines, and then sometimes people call because there’s a transient in the street or some other non-emergency and tie up the line. ”
An hour and a half after I arrived Fury got some action on her headset. Two people had showed up in the grove and gotten in the surveilled car. They were women. Officers were looking for a man.
Here’s one thing of value I learned. If you call 911, call from a landline, especially if you have any kind of non-Redlands accent. When you call from a landline, your address shows up on a screen. People don’t realize how hard they are to understand.
We were talking lots of interesting calls – too many to include.
I had imagined it would be all heart attacks, fires and shootings. What we were getting was noise, suspicious activity and creepy stuff I never would have thought of.
The dispatchers work three 12 1/2-hour shifts a week. This shift went until 6 a.m.
They said the day shift is busy, but it’s a different kind of busy. Businesses call to file reports, and there are thefts. People wake up and find stuff stolen or something’s happened.
In the night shift you get more of the fights, music calls, domestic calls. Prowlers you get only at night, or a suspicious vehicle in a neighborhood.
We got a call from someone in San Bernardino. Her mom and sister had gone for a walk in Redlands hours ago. They weren’t answering their phones. Hospitals hadn’t seen them.
Stansell told the caller without an address, there wasn’t anything we could do. Then just before she hung up she asked for their names, just in case they’d been arrested.
Bingo. They were the two women that had gotten in the car in the grove. Fury already had the women’s pictures and histories on her screen. They had been arrested with two men for burglary in Redlands a year ago.
While I listened to all of this I watched with fascination as every car that went through the intersection at Sixth Street and Colton Avenue ran the stop sign.
I also noted that half of the calls were made on behalf of someone else. “My daughter got a threatening voicemail. She’s right here if you want to talk to her.” “My grama doesn’t want my mom’s boyfriend in her house. She’s right here.” “My son’s girlfriend…. ”
I tried to get Stansell back to telling me about the unforgettable calls she’s taken when the line rang again with what would be my unforgettable call.
“I think my husband’s dying right now,” the woman started. There was more to it, and I have the whole exchange memorized, because I replayed it in my mind when I tried to sleep later. The caller was right.
I asked if either of the dispatchers had been there Jan. 5, 2011, during the Cinnamon Creek Apartments shooting.
“I was on the radio when the four kids got shot,” Stansell said. “We lucked out that there were three of us here. Every line lit up. Before the officers even got there we knew it was a mess. We had so many calls. It was on Facebook before the officers even got there. We had multiple victims in multiple locations. That’s not a call you usually get. It was crazy. There was conflicting information. First we had two shots, then there were three shots. ”
Stansell and Fury said they were both working during the fatal Charlie Jewell’s shooting.
“We knew there was a fight. The camera was already aimed there and officers were already on the way,” Stansell said. “We got multiple, multiple phone calls. Once we replayed it we could see the flash. There was a huge crowd. It was zoomed in right there. ”
When the fight started, their phones had lit up.
“That’s how you know something terrible’s happened,” Fury said. “The phones go (whoosh). They light up, and you go ‘Oh Crap, something happened.’ ”
When that happens, the mission of answering becomes finding someone who can lead to an arrest.
“We don’t ask names or anything. We just say, ‘Did you see anything? Do you have suspect info? No? Bye.’ Try the next one. We’re looking for witnesses at that point. A lot of people call if they just heard shots. ‘Thank you, bye.’ We can only get four calls at a time on 911,” Stansell said.
At quarter to midnight we got a call about a fight at Denny’s.
“I’ve got little kids in here,” the caller said. I watched her say it, because the camera had zoomed in through the window. Four men outdoors left the scene. We watched them as they went around the corner to Orange Street while Fury described their clothing and locations to officers, who caught up with them in front of the HundeHaus.
In all, it was a sad, scary, interesting, very cool experience.
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