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Probe Sought in Detroit EMS Response to Boy`s Fatal Fall
Emergency medical crews didn't immediately reach the site of a possible suicide of a 9-year-old boy Wednesday because police canceled the call after arriving on the scene, officials said Thursday.
But Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Detroit, said the time frame a city emergency medical services chief gave The Detroit News didn't match witness reports; she wants the state to investigate.
After the boy jumped or fell nine stories from a window at the Young Manor apartment complex on West Grand Boulevard around 5:30 p.m., police transported him to the hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
"If the officers arrived on the scene and picked him up and took him to the hospital, they would've canceled EMS," Sgt. Eren Stephens said.
Jerald James, chief of the Detroit Fire Department's EMS division, said an ambulance was sent 1 minute, 20 seconds after the 911 call. Police arrived 4½ minutes after the call, put the boy in the car and halted EMS, James said.
Emergency workers still arrived 12 minutes after the 911 call and about 30 minutes later transported the boy's mother to a hospital because she was "distraught" and "passed out," James said.
Tlaib said she didn't believe James' account of the event. "What I heard is that the EMS did not show because it was dispatched from the east side and the police couldn't wait, so they put the child in the back seat of the car," she said. "That's why I asked the state to investigate it."
The state Department of Community Health plans to ask the Detroit East Medical Control Authority, the local supervising organization, to probe the EMS response, department spokeswoman Angela Minicuci said.
Tashianna Ross, 20, who lives across the hall from the boy, said he played with her 6-year-old son on a "day-to-day basis," and she didn't think he took his own life.
"You never know what a child is going through, but I know for a fact he was a good boy," Ross said.
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