Emergency call operator jailed after hanging up on thousands of callers
A former 911 operator in Houston, US has been found guilty of hanging up on people making emergency calls.
Jurors on Wednesday found 44-year-old Crenshanda Williams guilty of interference with emergency telephone calls, a misdemeanor, according to the Harris County district attorney’s office.
A judge sentenced her to 10 days in jail and 18 months of probation.
Prosecutors said she worked as a 911 operator for a year and a half, ending in 2016. Records showed that thousands of calls lasting less than 20 seconds were attributed to her hanging up.
Calls varied from reports of robberies and homicides to reports of speeding vehicles.
Police said when Williams was questioned in June 2016, she told them she often hangs up on calls because she didn’t want to talk with anyone at that time.
In one incident, Williams hung up on a caller reporting a robbery in progress at a convenience store. The man called back and spoke to a different operator, but by the time police arrived, the store manager was fatally shot, the Duluth News Tribune reported.
A security guard had called 911 to report two motorists driving recklessly at high speed on a Houston freeway. Police said Williams was the 911 operator and cut short the call before the caller could provide his name.
According to a recording of the call, Williams hung up then said: “Ain’t nobody got time for this. For real.”
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One caller, Buster Pendley, said Williams hung up on him when his wife collapsed and lost consciousness. Pendley said he tried to perform CPR on his wife with one hand while calling 911 with the other, CBS News reported.
“The 911 operator answered the phone, and she said, ‘This is Crenshanda, may I help you?’” Pendley recalled. He told her his wife had passed out and needed an ambulance, the operator said OK then hung up.
He got help after a second 911 call and his wife, Sharon Stephens, survived, but the experience still makes her angry.
“I would have gotten from my hospital bed and gone to 911 and find out who did that to me,” she said.
Williams' supervisor was put on internal probation for a year, the Chronicle reported, but a jury found Williams criminally responsible for ignoring thousands of calls.
Williams had started working as a dispatcher in July 2014 and had taken thousands of calls, court documents say. But an audit a year and a half after she was hired found that an abnormally large number of her calls had lasted 20 seconds or less, and the city began an investigation.
"The citizens of Harris County rely on 911 operators to dispatch help in their time of need," Assistant District Attorney Lauren Reeder told Houston Fox affiliate KRIV.
"When a public servant betrays the community's trust and breaks the law, we have a responsibility to hold them criminally accountable."
