Frantic Mother Waits Hour for Ambulance

What took Fort Worth’s ambulance service, Medstar, an hour to arrive after a panicked mother whose baby had stopped breathing called 911?

My TV story tonight already ran long, and I didn’t have time to squeeze in some of the details I would have liked… So for all you out there that want some more information, here you go.

A MOTHER’S CALL FOR HELP

Nancy Milliken’s 13-month-old girl Aidyn had briefly stopped breathing and was having a seizure.

“She was just shaking, and she wasn’t breathing, and she was turning blue.”

But because the baby started breathing again and seemed to be stable, Medstar gave the call a low priority — Priority 3.

Frantic when an ambulance never came, the mother called 911 back three times!

“Do you know when somebody is going to be here?”

DELAYED RESPONSE

The first two ambulances that were dispatched got diverted to higher-priority calls.  There was a rash of emergencies at the same time, said Jack Eades, Medstar’s executive director.

Eades apologized for the delay and said he offered no excuses.

A third ambulance, dispatched later from JPS Hospital to the family’s home in far west Fort Worth, got stuck in traffic on I-30.  It finally arrived an incredible 59 minutes after the mother’s first 911 call for help. 

Nearly a full hour!

PRIORITIZING CALLS

Obviously any ambulance service has to prioritize calls.  The really sick or injured people need help before those who can wait.  Triage 101.

Medstar says a preliminary review indicates the dispatcher gave the call the correct priority.

But nobody can argue that an hour is a reasonable amount of time to wait for an ambulance in any emergency.  The “goal” for Priority 3 calls is to arrive in 15 minutes or less.

DELAY IN CALLING FIRE DEPARTMENT

The other part of this story is why Medstar waited 44 minutes to ask the fire department for help. Ironically, there’s a station just a few blocks away. Once dispatched, firefighters were able to arrive within minutes to help before paramedics finally got there.

The truth is firefighters are usually dispatched on Priority 1 and 2 calls, not on Priority 3.  So dispatchers followed protocal.

But why not send firefighters in such an extreme case? Sure would have made a lot of sense, and director Eades all but admitted so.

PARAMEDIC SHORTAGE

Medstar has battled response time problems on and off for years. The basic problem is a shortage of paramedics. Medstar has 20 empty positions right now.  It is stepping up recruitment efforts, offering to pay for recruits to go through 8 months of training. But many young paramedics choose to work for cities that run their own ambulance service, where they can make more money and better benefits.

HAPPY ENDING

As it turns out, this story has a happy ending. The baby is fine. Doctors say she did have a seizure from a high fever caused by a virus. But no lasting damage.

Let’s hope if there’s another delay this long, that story won’t have a more tragic ending.

NorthPark Mall Statement

In my last post, I mentioned that a NorthPark spokeswoman had not returned my phone calls from Friday night after the shooting.

Over the weekend, the mall issued the following statement:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

NORTHPARK MANAGEMENT COMPANY

OFFERS A $25,000 REWARD

DALLAS, Texas – On Friday night an incident resulting in a personal injury occurred in NorthPark’s far north parking lot, 50 feet off Park Lane. It appears to have been a spontaneous and random act.

The Dallas Police Department is responding to all questions with regard to the matter, and NorthPark is cooperating fully with the police in their investigation. The management of NorthPark Center takes the safety and well being of each of our patrons very seriously, and has always undertaken to provide the highest level of security. We will continue to do so. Lawless acts of any kind will not be tolerated at NorthPark Center, and anyone engaged in criminal activity at NorthPark Center will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

NorthPark Management Company is offering a $25,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and indictment of the suspect. The DPD report number is 145046-V. Anyone with information is asked to call Crime Stoppers at 214.760.8477. This reward will remain in effect for one (1) year.

Our heartfelt wishes are with the victim and her family.

For Information Contact:

Christine Szalay

NorthPark Center

 

 

Pit Bulls Attack; Should They be Outlawed?

Tonight I covered a very sad story about two pit bulls that viciously attacked a little 3-year-old Fort Worth girl.

Details of the attack were too gruesome to put on TV. But let’s just say it will be a miracle if she survives.

This isn’t the first story like this I’ve covered, and I’m just wondering if pit bulls should ever be around young children.

I’m all for protecting people’s rights to have pets, but I just think pitbulls are vicious by nature.

How many children have to be mauled or killed before people decide pit bulls don’t make good pets.

Just my opinion. What do you think?

Woman With Leukemia Has New Life

What a year for Lauren McCrary of the Fort Worth suburb of River Oaks.  From near death, she is back home with a different blood type, a new DNA, and nothing short of a new life.

Some of you may remember her, the teacher’s assistant with leukemia we first featured in a story several months ago. Yes, she’ll tell you she’s also a huge TCU fan.

She was in desperate need of a bone marrow transplant to save her life. Siblings usually provide the best match, but she was adopted at birth, grew up with her loving adoptive family in Granbury,  and had never met her biological family.

Through her ordeal, she was able to meet her birth family when the adoption agency finally got past its privacy concerns and helped hook them up.

Her story took so many twists and turns.  Turned out her family was NOT a match, but doctors did find one from a man in a national bone marrow registry.

Lauren got her transplant, thanks to the kindness of a stranger she has never met. (She has to wait one year before the registry will introduce her to the donor, if he agrees.)

After the bone marrow transplant, her blood type changed, and so did her DNA! (I never confirmed this with her or her doctors, but I suppose she has the same DNA has her donor.)

She’s back home now and doing great and plans to return to her teaching job at Castlebury High School next school year.

Because of the transplant, her leukemia is gone.  She still has to watch for signs of rejection of the donated marrow but she’s made it over the biggest hurdles and with her great attitude, I know she will do well.

Mother of Triplets Enjoys String of Threes

As the father of 11-year-old twins, I could relate to the story we did yesterday on a mother of new triplets.

Often on sleepless nights when my twins were little, I would tell myself “we could have had triplets!”

Well, Nicole and Johnathon Madison of Haslet had triplets, but that is not what makes their story so unique.

Consider the rash of “threes” that came with their births last Friday at Harris Methodist Hospital in Fort Worth.

–Nicole’s water broke at 3 am.

–The triplets were born the same day as their sister’s 3-year-old birthday.

–The triplets were born at 33 weeks.

–Nicole and Johnathon are about to turn 33.

They say the odds of natural-born triplets (Nicole took no fertility drugs) are about 1 in 8000. What do you think the odds of all those other “threes” are?

The Madisons have a beautiful family (that has just doubled in size) and I wish them the best.

Gridlock: DFW Number One

Ever think you’re spending more and more time stuck in traffic?

Well, a story I’m working on for the news tonight confirms your worst traffic fears!

A study by the Texas Transportation Institute shows D-FW is number one on the list of fastest-growing congestion.

The average commuter now spends 58 hours a year stuck in traffic, compared to just 10 hours back in 1982.

That’s an extra thousand bucks a year in wasted gas!

I didn’t get into this in the story, but we really need to invest in mass transportation. And Arlington, the third largest city in the metroplex, needs to come up with some kind of mass transit. (It’s the biggest city in the country without a mass transit system, not even public buses.)

A Replacement for the Internet?

Just read a really interesting article on the website of the Times of London, of all places… about something called “The Grid” that may one day replace the Internet.

It’s 10,000 times faster than a regular broadband connection.

Check it out.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article3689881.ece

 

When Politics and Tragedy Collide: Hillary’s Unscripted Moment

The festive rally Sen. Hillary Clinton had planned last week in front of Fort Worth’s old courthouse never happened, and I was there to cover it. The first indication that the tone had suddenly changed was when campaign aides sent the mariachi band packing before they played a note or sang a word. Quickly, word spread among the gathering crowd about why.

As her campaign struggles to stay viable, Sen. Clinton badly needs to court voters in Dallas and Fort Worth. Not a bad idea, since Sen. Barack Obama had been here several days earlier, and D-FW is the biggest metro area in Texas, which even Hillary’s husband Bill has said is a must-win for her March 4. Polls have shown it’s a statistical dead heat here.

Clinton had planned outdoor rallies first in Dallas, then in Fort Worth.

But on the way to a rally in Oak Cliff, her campaign took a tragic detour when a motorcycle officer escorting her motorcade wrecked and died. She was toward the front and apparently didn’t see the accident.

For a presidential candidate in a heated campaign, there is no script for something like this.

Clinton found out the officer had been injured immediately before her Dallas rally began, but it wasn’t known how serious it was, and she went ahead with the event as planned. She talked about the troubled economy, and health care. She hugged emotional supporters. Great images for the news cameras. Everything was going according to script.

But as soon as the rally was over, she learned the officer had died.

What to do.

The senator did the only thing she could. She cancelled the Fort Worth rally (she did appear for a few minutes to explain what was happening to her supporters who had waited in the late morning chill to see her.)

From a purely political standpoint, the message she had intended to send Friday was lost in news coverage of the officer’s death. Sr. Cpl. Victor Lozada was a 20-year veteran and father of four. He had worn a new uniform that day because he was so proud to escort a presidential candidate, the police chief recalled.

A tragedy like this, in the middle of a presidential campaign, offers a glimpse into how a candidate responds when thrown a curve ball and the “politics” of the day have to go out the window.

Senator Clinton was caught on an open microphone as she was leaving the Fort Worth stage, not realizing her comments were still being picked up by our news cameras. She was speaking to Constable Sergio DeLeon, a Hillary supporter and leading Tarrant County Democrat.

“I gotta go,” she said urgently. “I gotta get to the hospital.”

And with no glad-handing or picture-taking, she jumped in her SUV and the Secret Service driver rushed her to the hospital. Police Chief David Kunkle said Clinton privately comforted the officer’s widow for 15 minutes. Obviously there were no news cameras, no photo ops. Nothing to help her candidacy at a time when it desperately needed a boost.

No matter how you feel about her politics or her positions or her personally, whether you’re Democrat or Republican, you have to admit she handled herself admirably. Whether it all helps or hurts her campaign, who knows? (Helps because in the tragedy, people saw her human side. Hurts because of the missed opportunity to rally her supporters.)

The campaign, of course, must go on. From Texas, Clinton headed to Ohio.

Back in Dallas, the officer’s family, his friends and colleagues are left to grieve.

I knew it was a sad day when the mariachi band went home early.

The New Cowboys Stadium

If you haven’t had a chance to see the progress on the new Cowboys’ stadium in Arlington lately, you might be surprised. I snapped this picture with my BlackBerry when I drove by the other day. It is HUGE! The $1 billion stadium is set to open in 2009 and will host the Super Bowl in 2011.

To Catch a Killer

As a TV reporter, I’m often frustrated by how little time we have in a TV newscast to tell a story. Of course we hit the highlights, the headlines. But sadly it’s often the details, the depth, that gets lost.

So when our friends at the Star-Telegram asked us last week to help them kick off their 24-part series, “To Catch a Killer,” it was a pleasure.

We aired a report in our Friday 10pm broadcast, basically teasing the story and inviting people to read the full version in the newspaper, which will stretch over the next month. (In our short TV version we couldn’t possibly get into the depth that the newspaper could in 24 installments.)

Their ambitious story covers every angle of one of the most intriguing crime sagas in Fort Worth in the past decade.

Several of the Star-T’s best reporters — Tim Madigan, Deanna Boyd and Melody McDonald — spent a year exploring the case of convicted killer Andy Ortiz, a gang member and general all-around punk from Fort Worth’s North Side, linked to the strangulation murders of two teenage girls and one young woman over three years.

I hope people have the appetite to devour it all. For those who like crime stories, it’s a great read. It’s also great journalism. To think it’s all true is more than a little chilling.

In this new media age, the newspaper includes a number of video and multimedia elements on their website, including a prison interview with Ortiz himself. If you haven’t had a chance, check it out at
Star-Telegram.com