Deaf Man’s Wife Dies After 911 Incident : Police: The department said the emergency operator’s mistake in hanging up caused a delay in response time.

A Los Angeles police 911 operator hung up on a deaf man who used a special communicator to report that his 80-year-old wife was having difficulty breathing, and the woman died before paramedics arrived more than 15 minutes later, authorities said Tuesday.

Police said they were investigating the March 8 incident in Northridge and promised a review of department procedures for handling 911 calls from the deaf on telephone-teletype links known as TDDs.

Capt. Forrest Lewallen, in charge of police emergency communications, said the operator made a mistake in hanging up and caused about a 10-minute delay in response time.

Sylvia Linden died of heart failure while her husband, Irving Linden, 79, waited in vain for a response from the 911 operator, not realizing she had not received his message, said their daughter, Joyce Groode of Chatsworth.

Help finally arrived after Linden got through to the Los Angeles Fire Department using a regular seven-digit telephone number.

Pauline Annarino, a program development specialist for the Greater Los Angeles Council on Deafness, said the incident illustrates the need for better training of 911 operators who handle calls from the hearing-impaired. “The system they have is not working,” she said.

Lewallen said the Los Angeles Fire Department paramedic supervisor on the scene told him that the woman would have died even if help had come promptly. “The 10 minutes was not a factor in life and death,” he said.

Groode disagreed.

“The 10 minutes that was lost when he was waiting for a response to the first call might have saved my mother’s life,” Groode said. “We feel the people that operate the system were not trained properly.”

Lewallen said the operator who hung up on the call, whom he would not identify, has an excellent record and remains on the job, but could face disciplinary action.

Linden called 911 using a TDD, or telecommunications device for the deaf, connected to his telephone. The device sends typed messages to other TDD-equipped phones, which display the messages on a screen or print them out on paper. Similar to telephone links, the device displays the caller’s address on an emergency operator’s screen.

Lewallen and Groode gave differing accounts of what went wrong.

Groode said her father called 911 about 4 a.m. after his wife, also deaf, woke him to say she was having trouble breathing. “She was very agitated and panicked and pacing the floor,” Groode said.

According to a printout of the messages taken from Linden’s TDD, the police operator responded: “Los Angeles Police Department GA.”

GA is the TDD abbreviation for “Go Ahead.”

Linden typed: “Pls send paramedic” to his address “right away GA.” After getting no reply, he typed, “Are you sending paramedic now GA?”

Again, there was no response.

Lewallen, however, said Linden failed to respond to the initial acknowledgment and that the operator disconnected the call, thinking Linden had hung up.

“There was a slight delay--I don’t know why--in his response,” Lewallen said. “The operator disconnected. . . . She erred.”

Groode said she was told by another police communications representative, whose name she could not remember, that the operator did receive at least one response, a message saying “Pls send paramedic” but hung up, apparently thinking the line was disconnected when she saw no additional messages on the TDD printout.

According to Groode, Linden eventually hung up because he assumed his address and phone number had been automatically displayed on the dispatcher’s computer screen and that help was on its way.

Ten minutes later he called the Fire Department. Paramedics arrived at 4:32 a.m., checked Sylvia Linden for vital signs and emerged from the bedroom saying “There’s nothing we can do.”

Lewallen said the incident was rare and that “99.9% of the time” the Police Department’s TDD system works well.

He said as a result of the incident he has ordered operators to automatically call back all TDD calls that are disconnected, and if communication is not re-established to send a patrol car to the address where the call originated.