From NewsChannel 9: When you call 911 for an emergency, you expect to get help, and fast. But one Meigs County family says it took mo
From NewsChannel 9: When you call 911 for an emergency, you expect to get help, and fast.
But one Meigs County family says it took more than an hour, and an ambulance from a different county for their daughter to get help.
“I don’t hear sirens, what is going on? Where are they?” Rebecca Schroeder says. “Something was going on. I don’t know what. And it just kept getting worse.”
97 minutes. That is the amount of time it took for Monroe County EMS to help 19-year-old Rebecca Schroeder, the daughter of a NewsChannel 9 employee.
“I started convulsing, and my head kept jerking back looking up at the sky. And the whole time I was on the phone with my dad just crying my eyes out,” Rebecca says.
A scary reaction she believes started with a new perfume she tested on her skin.
Rebecca says waiting for help was the worst part.
“The availability of personnel just makes it very difficult for us,” Tony Finnell says.
Tony Finnell is the Director for Meigs County EMA, the initial emergency service that got the 911 call.
“There was an initial call that my crew was on and then 17 minutes later, there was this second call. My ambulance was already at the scene and committed to that first call,” says Finnell.
Finnell says Meigs County EMS did not have adequate staffing to respond quickly.
Finally, after more than 90 minutes, Monroe County EMS responded to Rebecca’s call after three other services turned it down.
Rebbecca’s father, still pushing for answers, is now worried this could happen to someone else.
“It makes me really angry. Makes me panic for my kid. It makes me just say, ‘What’s going on here? How, how does it get to this?'” says Scean Schroeder. “Something needs to change to get that response time to something more realistic.”
