Feeble Plea for Help to 911 Gets Strong Reaction

When police dispatcher Naomi Jackson answered the incoming call on the 911 emergency service line Wednesday night, all she heard was a gurgling sound. Then the line went dead. There had been the usual calls earlier in the evening from kids playing on the phone.

“But this struck me funny,” said Jackson, 29, who has worked more than four years as a police dispatcher, first in San Diego and now for the Los Angeles Police Department.

Unsettled by the strange call, Jackson dialed the caller back. (When someone calls the 911 emergency number, their address and phone number automatically flash on a console in front of the dispatcher.)

There was the gurgling sound again, but this time, she heard a strained and very faint call of “help.”

Paramedics were dispatched to a duplex on Lucerne Avenue in southwest Los Angeles where they found 82-year-old Sanders Mathews barely breathing.

“If they hadn’t reached him, he would be dead,” said Dr. Debra Judelson, who treated Mathews after his arrival at Westside Hospital. She said that Mathews, who was listed in critical condition Thursday afternoon, had contracted pulmonary edema, a disorder in which the lungs fill with fluids.

Mathews, a widower who lives alone, had suffered a stroke a few years ago and was at times confined to a wheelchair, according to relatives and neighbors.

Before he dialed 911 Wednesday night, Mathews had called a nephew, Haywood Brooks, of Altadena.

“He was short of breath and kind of incoherent,” Brooks recalled. “He didn’t know what to do and we couldn’t get there fast enough to do anything ourselves, so we told him to call 911 and then we rushed over there.”

Tried to Call Back

After Jackson dispatched the paramedics, she tried twice to reach Mathews again, but there was no answer.

She was “really relieved,” she said, when her supervisor told her about 30 minutes later that Mathews had pulled through.

As many as 5,000 calls a day are received by emergency dispatchers at the city’s communication center, and Jackson said she gets her share of crank calls, as well as the usual calls from people fighting who want a police car right away.

“This is the first time it happened quite this way,” Jackson said. “I’m glad I didn’t think it was just kids calling and not call back. . . . It’s all in a day’s work.”