A Deadly Silence : 911 Calls Weren’t the Answer for Mute Man Seeking Help for Dying Wife

Jay Shufeldt knew things were not right when he returned from work and found his wife, Mary, still dozing in bed. He tapped her gently, waited a while, checked her heart, waited. Her breathing seemed troubled so he decided to call 911, the emergency phone number.

Repeatedly over several hours on the evening of July 17, Shufeldt and his lawyer say he dialed 911 on his teletype machine for the deaf. Each time he dialed, no one responded. His wife’s mouth began to move slowly. Her lips grew parched.

Finally, Shufeldt reached his daughter, who is not deaf and called 911 “by voice.” A San Diego fire truck arrived, paramedics rushed in, placed Mrs. Shufeldt on the floor and began resuscitation. Then they seemed to shake their heads and put her back on the bed.

Mary Shufeldt had died.

“I feel that she would still be alive,” Shufeldt said sadly, speaking through a sign language interpreter last week. “But we had to wait, and she got worse and worse and worse. . . . Oh, I’m really disappointed with 911. It just didn’t work. They didn’t do what they were supposed to do.”

Two and a half weeks later, a 911 supervisor investigating the incident paid a visit to the office of Shufeldt’s lawyer, Gregg Relyea. While the investigator was there, Relyea says he suggested they try calling 911 on the teletypewriter Relyea keeps in office for deaf clients.

“I proceeded to call 911 with my teletypewriter,” Relyea said last week. “The 911 office hung up on me. Not once, but three times in a row. Three times consecutively I made calls and each time the 911 office hung up the phone.

“I explained to (the investigator) that those three calls could easily have represented three separate life-threatening emergencies for different deaf people,” said Relyea, who often works with deaf people but can hear. “And he didn’t have any explanation for it.”

Officials of the San Diego Police Department, which operates the city’s 911 system, declined to comment on the case and Relyea’s allegations, saying the case may end up in litigation. They also declined to release the reports of two investigations into the matter.

But Lt. Curt Munro pointed out in an interview that systems of all sorts fail--perhaps through mechanical failure or operator error or a mistake by the caller. The 911 system receives about 35,000 calls each month, he said. Only 35, one in 1,000, come from devices used by the deaf for phone communication.

“We have to understand that any system is going to have failures on occasion. Any computer is going to fail, any system is going to fail,” he said. But he added, with emphasis, “I’m not saying, by saying that, that in this case the system failed.”

Munro, who is acting supervisor of the 911 system, added, “I don’t want anybody thinking we consider the hearing- or speaking-disabled worthy of a lesser level of emergency service than anyone else.”

Under the city’s system, the deaf are supposed to be able to reach the 911 system through any telecommunications device for the deaf (TDD). All they need do is turn on the machine, dial and press the keyboard’s space bar until someone answers.

Emergency operators are trained to recognize the sound of a TDD, a high-pitched electronic beeping triggered by the space bar. Once they hear it, Munro said, they should transfer the call to the one telephone in the communications office that is equipped with a TDD.

Another operator should then communicate with the caller, asking for basic information about the emergency. On all 911 calls, TDD or not, if there is no response on the other end of the line, department policy requires that an officer be dispatched.

“Remember, 911 is a FREE call that you can make from any telephone with your TDD in California,” reads a brochure that Pacific Bell distributed to TDD owners in March, 1986. “ . . . 911 has saved thousands of lives and stopped crime. Don’t be afraid to use it.”

Jay Shufeldt had read that brochure closely. That’s the type of man Shufeldt is, Relyea said. While written English remains for some deaf people “a second language,” Relyea said, Shufeldt is an avid reader who aggressively pursues “information about the world.”

Now 74, Shufeldt lost his hearing in infancy. Raised in Oklahoma, he moved to San Diego in 1936. He was a printer for the Tribune and was active in the San Diego Club for the Deaf, through which he met Mary Bell, a young Navy instrumentation artist, in 1944.

“I hooked her immediately,” Shufeldt recalled with pleasure. They were married one month later. Over the next decades they raised two children--a son, now living in Los Angeles, and a daughter, living in San Diego.

Jay Shufeldt retired from the San Diego Union in 1974 but immediately began volunteering in the city’s senior citizens’ center for the deaf. He spends his days behind a counter in City Hall, helping people with Social Security and housing, and is active in seniors citizens’ groups.

Mary, who was 72 when she died, was less active, preferring to stay at home with the cat in the 1st Avenue apartment. She liked to watch television and follow horse races. Though she was a heavy smoker, Relyea insists Mrs. Shufeldt’s health was generally good.

“Right now, our early information is she didn’t die from a heart attack, stroke or embolism,” Relyea said. “Our information is that she didn’t have a sudden death. She went gradually downhill while they were waiting, waiting, waiting.”

The cause of death, Relyea said, was chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, a lung condition that had bothered her three years earlier. She was hospitalized then for a week. After that, she had not seen a doctor until the week she died, Relyea said.

On July 14, she had gone to UC San Diego Medical Center complaining of discomfort in her chest. According to Relyea, her medical records state “no abnormalities noted.” She was to have returned for a “routine follow-up” the following week, he said.

Relyea said a pulmonary specialist, whom he declined to name, has told him that an acute episode of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease need not be fatal. Relyea said, “It’s the kind of problem where if emergency personnel arrive at the scene and assist the person, it can be handled.”

On July 17, when he returned from work, Jay Shufeldt thought it odd that his wife was still lying in bed just as he had left her in the morning. He tried making her some coffee and nudging her and waiting. When he noticed her troubled breathing, he dialed 911.

After all, it had worked a month earlier when Shufeldt had gone out one morning and discovered the starter yanked out of his car. He had simply dialled 911, hit the space bar and waited. A police car was there within minutes, he and Relyea said.

But this time no one came. From time to time, Shufeldt would step out the front door to look. He called his son in Los Angeles for advice, then called 911 again. When his son then offered to call from Los Angeles, Shufeldt said no, he could manage with his TDD.

He tried again, then called his daughter, leaving a message with her roommate for when she returned from work. He couldn’t turn to his neighbors: They spoke only Spanish and had no phone. And his wife was too heavy for him to lift and take to his car.

“I wanted to be close, close with her,” said Shufeldt, growing animated in his distress at the recollection. “Maybe if she had woken up . . . Really, I couldn’t leave, just take off.”

Finally, Shufeldt’s daughter returned to her home and called 911. Shufeldt ran into the street and flagged down the fire truck. But by the time the paramedics had moved Mrs. Shufeldt to the floor and begun resuscitation, she was dead.

The police department keeps detailed records of the 911 system in the cavernous basement of the city operations building where it is based. There are computer printouts of every call received--the time it came in, the time an operator responded, and the time they hung up.

In addition, the phone number and address of the caller flashes up on a small box at the console every time a call comes in. That address can be used for dispatching an officer, if for some reason the caller cannot or does not speak.

“Please note that if you hear nothing on the line you may have got a caller who has forgotten to signal, is unable to speak or has collapsed,” says a tape cassette used for training emergency operators in handling TDD calls.

Munro said it seems that some TDD callers may think they have been cut off when the operator transfers their call to the TDD terminal. Though one operator said the transfer takes just one or two seconds, Munro said it can take longer.

“The problem is that a lot of deaf people that call think that the transfer is a disconnect,” he said. “And it’s not a disconnect. We lose some that way.”

Nevertheless, he said that, if a call is lost in transit, the office still has a record of the phone number of the caller. It can trace that number through the telephone company and dispatch to that address, Munro said.

“I’m obviously not saying that we handle every call correctly,” he said. But he said that, in theory, an officer should be dispatched even if a deaf caller hangs up during a transfer.

According to Relyea, on Aug. 4 he and the investigator made three calls from his office and all three went unanswered. Only after the investigator left did an emergency operator call back and ask Relyea whether he had just called, he said.

When Relyea said he had, the woman suggested he should have waited longer on the line, hitting the TDD’s space bar longer, he said. When he told her he had waited quite a while, she said a TDD pickup can take three minutes, Relyea said.

Munro said 911 calls of all types should be answered immediately: In July, only 247 out of about 35,000 entailed a delay. The average time until pickup on emergency and non-emergency calls was 6.7 seconds that month. The 911 average, he said, would be much less.

Munro pointed out that San Diego has had a computer-aided dispatch system since 1972--long before other municipalities. He said, “We have been providing a state-of-the-art service to the community--911, TDD, otherwise--for many years now.”

But Relyea and Shufeldt say they are close to filing suit.

“I think the deaf community deserves an explanation from the police department as to what happened with Mrs. Shufeldt,” Relyea said. “ . . . And I think the deaf community deserves an assurance that it won’t happen in the future.”