Woman’s death after 911 response errors prompts Kansas City to pay up. Will system change?
Kansas City and the Kansas City Police Department will pay $2 million each to settle a lawsuit filed by a Prairie Village man who claims his wife died five years ago because police and fire department dispatchers mishandled a 911 call. The agencies also agreed to evaluate the 911 system regularly going forward.
The City Council’s finance committee on Tuesday recommended that the full council approve the city’s half of the $4 million settlement at its regular weekly meeting on Thursday.
Mayor Quinton Lucas said the Board of Police Commissioners, of which he is a member, authorized payment of an equal amount on July 30. The amount was redacted from that day’s meeting minutes because no final disposition of the matter had occurred at that time.
Beyond the millions of dollars changing hands, the settlement agreement requires that authorities conduct random audits of the city’s 911 system to prevent similar tragedies from occurring, according to attorney Brian McCallister, who represents the family of Cathryn McClelland.
Her husband, Frank McClelland, alleged that his wife died at age 40 because emergency responders arrived too late to save her from suffering permanent brain damage, and she had a heart attack and stopped breathing.
“It’s called Cathryn’s Code, and it will be, as part of the settlement, required that the Board of Police Commissioners adopt a new policy where there are a minimum of 50 recorded 911 calls pulled randomly every month and reviewed for quality control and quality assurance,” McCallister said.
“That was not being done by the board. That was an admitted fact in one of the depositions by the board’s representative.”
A police department spokesman declined comment “to ensure fairness for all sides in this pending litigation.”
Cathryn McClelland awoke with chest pains on the morning of July 18, 2019. Her husband was out of state on a construction job, while she was at home in Prairie Village caring for their 8-year-old son and 3-year-old daughter.
According to the lawsuit in Jackson County Circuit Court, she collapsed on the kitchen floor shortly after 6 a.m. The couple’s son was with her and immediately called 911 on her cell phone.
As their home was near the state line, his call was routed to the Kansas City Police Department emergency call center. Call takers there are trained to expect and handle calls routed to them from Johnson County through the regional 911 system.
They are supposed to then contact Kansas agencies for emergency service. But the dispatcher who took the call that morning instead contacted the Kansas City Fire Department for help.
She acknowledged later in a deposition that she knew to contact Johnson County authorities instead, but never explained why she didn’t do that.
“We will never know why she did what she did,” he said in an interview with The Star.
The police dispatcher said she knew KCFD was not authorized to send an ambulance across the state line. An emergency response was further delayed when that dispatcher and a fire department dispatcher became confused as to the correct address in Prairie Village.
Even though the 8-year-old boy had given his correct address more than once over the phone, the original call taker questioned whether that address in Prairie Village was correct as her electronic location-finder showed the call originating from somewhere else in that city.
So the original call taker called the father in Iowa to confirm the address, only to call the Kansas City Fire Department again. A supervisor who overheard the confusion intervened and contacted Johnson County, McCallister said.
“You can literally hear in (the supervisor’s) voice the anger that an ambulance had not been requested and she testified – and these are her words, not mine – ‘I was pissed,’“ he said.
The first responders were Prairie Village police who, due to the dispatch errors, did not arrive at the home until nearly 14 minutes after the initial 911 call, according to court documents.
An ambulance came soon after, court records show. While first responders were able to get her breathing again, Cathyrn McClelland never regained consciousness and was pronounced dead four days later.
Despite hearing their testimony in depositions, McCallister said he doesn’t know why the dispatchers ignored their training and made mistakes that he believes led to Cathryn McClelland’s death.
“They did not do anything intentionally. They didn’t say to themselves, we’re going to kill (the boy’s) mother,” he said. “I really think it goes to the training and how the board failed to pound it into these people’s heads that when they get a call from Kansas, which they do routinely get, that it needs to be immediately transferred to the proper agency.”
Lucas told the finance committee that he expects more discussion surrounding the future of the 911 system. He’s been critical of its long wait times. Last week, he introduced a plan to unify the police and fire/ambulance systems for greater efficiency, but told reporters that it could be a complicated negotiation.
“To me there are a few basic rules of local government and things we’re really supposed to do,” he said. “Roads, somebody responds to 911, police and fire. Right now, failing at one of those foundational steps is something that I find wholly unacceptable.”
Bad 911 service is annoying for some and a matter of life or death for many others, McCallister said. He hopes this settlement reinforces that point to policy makers, but he can’t be sure it will.
“What I’m concerned about is not even this is going to change the horrific 911 service that we get in Kansas City,” he said. “That’s why we had to have that unusual Cathryn’s Code added to the settlement, because it wasn’t just about money. It was about making change and keeping people safe.”
This story was originally published August 6, 2024 at 4:30 PM.
