The City Department of Investigation concluded that the delayed 911 response to the street corner where a 4-year-old girl was hit by a car and eventually died was due to human error.
Ariel Russo and her grandmother were mowed down June 4 by an SUV. The driver, an unlicensed teenager, lost control of the car as it rounded a corner, ran on the sidewalk and pinned Russo against a store gate at West 97th Street and Amsterdam Avenue, the New York Daily News reported.
Police on the scene immediately notified NYPD dispatch. But the ambulance, which was delayed four minutes, did not come in time to take Russo to the hospital. An investigation into the cause of the delay concluded it was not caused by a computer glitch, but by a series of communication mistakes between city employees.
The report names 911 dispatcher Edna Pringle, who was at the relay desk when the call for Russo came in around 8:15 a.m., less than a minute after she was hit. Pringle "did not take steps to view and process the incident," but instead "went on a break while the notification about the Ariel incident was still pending," the report said, according to PIX 11.
"Im shocked right now," Sofia Russo, Ariel Russo's mother, told the Daily News. "This woman, she didn't do her job. Ariel was depending on this woman at this moment. This was her lifeline."
The report goes on to say that Pringle's lieutenant, Stephen Valladares, "took no supervisory action when the call was visible on the screen for approximately four minutes," the report said.
Another dispatcher, Vadim Lopatine, responded to the call at 8:19 am. and dispatched EMS to the scene, the Daily News reported. EMS arrived at the site about five minutes later and transported Ariel Russo to St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital. She was pronounced dead when she arrived.
"It breaks my heart to know that advanced life support that she needed for her passage ways to breath- that it was not sent out, and that she was waiting for almost ten minutes," said Sofia Russo said, PIX 11 reported.
The girl's family has filed civil lawsuits and their attorney is requesting that Pringle be criminally investigated, the Daily News reported.
