COLORADO SPRINGS – As admitted Planned Parenthood shooter Robert Dear left a trail of dead and wounded last November, 911 dispatcher Brianna Ragsdale lived the fear, panic and sadness experienced by a witness in hiding, terrified that help might not arrive before the shooter.
“I stayed on the phone with that person until they were safe – and it was a couple of hours – and I didn’t know what was going to happen. I had no idea,” the 24-year-old Ragsdale recalled a year later. “You want them to be safe, you do, because you connect with that person on a level that a lot of people don’t understand. But you can only do so much.”
Finally hanging up the phone, she needed to excuse herself to cry.
It’s the same emotional roller-coaster that all Colorado Springs police 911 employees face, day in and day out, while answering the city’s emergencies.
They talk to residents threatening suicide. They walk frantic mothers through CPR on children who have stopped breathing. They help other mothers bring new life into the world.
Dispatcher Josh Nelson, 27, answered a call from a homicide suspect wanting to explain the killing in an effort to gain his sympathy.
They’re all moments shared between strangers, communication center director Renee Henshaw said. But they’re real for all involved.
“While you’re connected with that caller, you’re living that with them,” Henshaw said.
“You have people confessing their sins or asking you to say goodbye to their families or you’re listening to gunshots over the phone and you’re living that with them. And as soon as you hang up the phone, you know that you’ll be physically safe, but you can’t sit there and tell that caller, ‘Don’t worry, everything will be OK. You’re going to be fine.’ We can’t say that because we don’t know.”
For most of those calls, 911 staff never learn the outcome – did the child live, was the victim safe, is the suicidal patient getting help? There’s always another call waiting on the line.
“You’ll go from a CPR call to a tow truck driver saying they’re going to tow a car,” Nelson said.
It’s also difficult when callers are uncooperative, dispatcher Ian Martinez said.
When residents call from a land line, the computer system can usually pick up their location. The problem is, most people today use cellphones, Martinez, 24, said.
Sometimes a cellphone will ping its location in an area as big as half the city, Martinez said. And coordinates don’t follow the phone if it’s moving.
“They’re screaming at you saying, ‘I know you know where I’m at, just send the police’ and then they hang up on you ... That’s hard,” Martinez said. “It doesn’t work that way.”
One lighter side to the job, though, is the silly calls the three say they’ve answered over the years.
Some are pocket dials. Sometimes callers just need directions. One of Ragsdale’s callers asked for the number to India. Another person told Martinez about a herd of deer grazing on the side of a road. A woman once called requesting help killing a spider.
They’re not emergencies and have to be rerouted to the city’s non-emergency line, 719-444-7000, but even then, call takers listen and answer those silly questions when they can.
It all adds up to a job they say they’d sign up for again.
