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Florida Paramedic Firings Bring Attention to Bogus 911 Calls

11/26/2006

CLEARWATER - At the height of the lunch-hour rush, a large crowd gathered around a 36-year-old woman lying in the grass in front of restaurants on Gulf-to-Bay Boulevard. Passers-by dialed 911. A paramedic arrived, recognized her, and told her to get up.

"Ha ha," said the Dunedin woman, who was later arrested. "I got you again."

Always a frustrating scenario in the emergency medical services field, the bogus 911 call has recently received renewed attention in the Tampa Bay area because of the actions - or inaction - of two Clearwater Fire & Rescue paramedics.

Lead Medic Trevor Murray and paramedic Mike Jones remained at their fire station one morning last year instead of driving to the home of a 41-year-old Clearwater woman who had a history of falsely claiming to have been raped - and was doing so again.

Murray and Jones were fired. They appealed to independent arbitrators, who told the city to give the men their jobs back. The city commission this month chose to fight the arbitrators' rulings.

While the two await news of their fate, police and emergency medical administrators continue to grapple with their options when it comes to the repeat 911 abuser.

5 Or 6 Repeat Offenders At A Time

It is difficult to quantify how many false 911 calls are made, public safety officials say, who add that the calls tie up ambulance and police cruisers that otherwise would be going to real emergencies.

"It's a problem," said Chuck Kearns, director of Pinellas County's Emergency Medical Services and Fire Administration. "It's a big problem."

In Tampa, there may be five or six individuals at any one time who are using the 911 system on a frequent basis, said Capt. Bill Wade of Tampa Fire Rescue.

Before Murray and Jones declined to respond to the woman's call for help on March 26, 2005, ambulances had been dispatched to her home 15 times in a three-year period. Only twice did a call result in a trip to the hospital, according to Clearwater records.

However, neither the city nor police nor emergency medical service administrators considered her a 911 abuser, subject to criminal charges, because the calls stemmed from what is described in city records as her very serious psychiatric condition.

Still, authorities thought something had to be done.

A few months after the two medics were fired, Clearwater police Deputy Chief Dewey Williams wrote a letter to a judge presiding over a case in which the woman was charged with driving with a revoked license.

The issue of her mental competency had been raised during her proceedings, but it was decided that although she was not competent to stand trial, she did not meet the criteria for involuntary hospitalization, court records show. She remained free on the condition she worked with Suncoast Center for Community Mental Health.

That order was issued in June 2005. Two months later, Williams was writing Pinellas-Pasco Circuit Judge R. Timothy Peters, complaining the problem had not been solved. Police had responded to the woman's home 149 times since May 2003, writing reports in 98 of the cases, Williams wrote. She always claimed to be raped; in every case her claim was unfounded, Williams wrote. "Her almost daily calls to 911 create a substantial drain on public safety resources," Williams wrote. The woman needed to be put in the state mental hospital, he said.

The same month, an FBI agent wrote to Clearwater police to say the woman had made 20 telephone calls to the agency's public corruption unit, claiming that she was raped by President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, among others, court records show.

Law Enforcers Become Caregivers

"It's when the patient doesn't want treatment, or doesn't want to cooperate with those resources, it defaults to law enforcement to be their caregivers, and that's what we ended up being here," Williams said.

The woman's conditional release was revoked late last year. She was arrested in Illinois, was bailed out by her mother, and has not been seen in Clearwater since, according to court records and authorities.

Ideally, a 911 call should not be used to help someone with psychiatric problems, said Laurie A. Romig, medical director for Pinellas County Emergency Medical Services. Rather, case managers should be tending to these people, making sure they are taking their medications, she said. But such a system does not exist for the majority of mentally ill people.

"It's difficult and it's frustrating because we know a large part of the problem is their infrastructure isn't there," Romig said. "Mentally ill people will sometimes have delusions and hallucinations, and they may or may not be adequately medicated or followed up."

Often the only way to get them medical attention is to charge them with a crime, said Bruce Bartlett, chief assistant for the Pinellas-Pasco State Attorney's Office.

"If they have a bona fide competency issue, that should be ferreted out by way of criminal charges and by having doctors appointed to examine them," Bartlett said. "If they meet the criteria and are found to be incompetent," Bartlett said, they should be sent to the state mental hospital.

Bartlett called the woman who staged her own rescue on Gulf-to-Bay Boulevard on July 14, 2000, the poster child for the problem. The woman has been charged more than a dozen times during the past nine years, in Pinellas and Hillsborough counties, in connection with bogus or emergency medical service calls.

Kearns, Pinellas' Emergency Medical Services director, said the woman's specialty is faking seizures. The woman has been transported 343 times, Kearns said, and she owes the county $28,000 in unpaid ambulance bills. During one call, a rescue unit and ambulance were rushing to the woman's location when someone else was having a heart attack several blocks away, Kearns said. Court records show that in another instance, a deputy got into a wreck on his way to help her.

The woman has been found competent after being evaluated by psychiatrists twice, Kearns said. "She knows exactly what she's doing," he said. "She enjoys the attention she gets."

In such a situation, the only alternative is incarceration, but because 911 or EMS abuse is a misdemeanor, the longest sentence the woman has received is a year, records show.

"We just ran her last week," Kearns said. "The only time we don't run her is when she's in jail."

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