RTD Discloses Errors Dealing With Bus Crisis

A bus driver’s plea for help with a gun-wielding passenger produced a chaotic response at Rapid Transit District headquarters, with dispatchers first misreporting that the gun was brandished by a pedestrian and not a passenger and, after shooting broke out, sending officers to a wrong location.

The missteps were revealed Friday as RTD officials released recordings of radio communications from a Wednesday night incident in which an apparently deranged passenger mortally wounded one rider, Bernard Calonne, 31, and then was killed by police.

“I don’t want to alarm anybody,” driver Harold Carter, a 12-year veteran, told an RTD dispatcher by radio after describing the situation, “so I want to know if I can have security meet me out (on the route).”

But as Carter drove, awaiting help, a confused RTD police dispatcher did not realize the emergency was on the bus and, about 20 minutes later, 42-year-old passenger Esther Rachel Rogers opened fire. After the shooting, police had trouble locating the bus because of faulty directions from the RTD.

On Friday, the Sheriff’s Department said that officers eventually decided to storm the bus rather than wait for the woman with the gun to fall asleep or surrender because she kept pointing her revolver toward the front of the bus and ignored repeated orders to surrender.

The confusion and delay demonstrated on the tape buttress complaints by drivers that the RTD command center is dangerously outdated and that the transit district’s police force lacks enough staff to protect drivers or passengers from a disturbing number of violent criminals.

RTD officials denied that the system is unsafe, but conceded that procedural errors delayed help to its bus and acknowledged that they plan to build a more sophisticated communication center within two years.

“We in the RTD are going to do everything we have to do to avoid a repeat of this tragic situation,” said Art Leahy, the transit district’s assistant general manager. “But despite this tragic situation, the RTD remains a safe system.”

The transcripts show that at 9:50 p.m. Wednesday, Carter told bus dispatcher Myrna Ramirez that one of his passengers was sitting on the back seat of the bus, “holding an object that looks like a hand pistol.”

He added that he didn’t know “exactly” what the object was and indicated that he would continue driving as usual to avoid alarming his approximately 20 passengers. He asked for RTD transit police to meet him along his route.

RTD officials said Ramirez spent three minutes taking the call and finishing the paperwork required for each incident reported by drivers. Ramirez then left her post and walked around a glass partition to bring the problem to Charles Jenkins, an RTD police dispatcher.

Jenkins logged Ramirez’s arrival at 9:56 p.m., but he was already talking by telephone to the Los Angeles Police Department about another crime in progress, an assault at 91st Street and Vermont Avenue in South-Central Los Angeles. The two dispatchers talked at this time, but somehow the message got garbled.

When Jenkins finished dealing with the South-Central emergency at 9:59 p.m., he mistakenly told police that an RTD driver had reported seeing a woman with a gun standing on the sidewalk at Santa Monica Boulevard and Gower Street in Hollywood.

In fact, that was where Carter had reported the woman on his bus.

Another nine minutes elapsed before the dispatcher, Ramirez, radioed Carter to ask him for a further description of the woman and her weapon. RTD officials said they did not know what prompted her to ask that question, though it could have been an attempt to clear up the confusion about where the woman was located.

Three minutes later, at 10:11 p.m., Carter hit the silent alarm on his bus, sending a radio signal of the bus number to RTD headquarters and changing the bus’s destination sign to read “Emergency. Please call police.” He did this, evidently, immediately after the woman fired two rounds from a .357 magnum revolver into Calonne, whose family is from New Caledonia in the South Pacific. Calonne was struck in the chest and arm. At that point, Carter stopped the bus and fled along with all the passengers except Rogers.

Carter could not be reached for comment.

Although the driver had given his location three minutes earlier--a location indicating that he was running considerably behind schedule--RTD dispatchers did not know where to send help even after the silent-alarm emergency was received. At first, they relied on the bus schedule, which indicated the bus should be in Westwood; police units were directed there first, then anywhere on Santa Monica Boulevard from west of Beverly Hills to east of Santa Monica.

In fact, the bus was more than two miles away, at Alta Avenue in eastern Beverly Hills. Beverly Hills police were the first law enforcement units on the scene, responding to a citizen complaint of shots being fired in a bus.

RTD confusion continued for several more minutes after the bus was known to be in Beverly Hills. Units were confused about whether the bus was located at Roxbury Drive or Rexford Drive when in fact it was more than seven blocks away from both.

Such confusion does not surprise drivers.

“If you hit the SAS (silent) alarm, you’d better pray you’re on schedule, because if you are late, they’ll never find you,” said one driver, who asked to remain anonymous. “Listen to the radio sometime. They’re always saying, ‘We’re looking for Bus 2005. If anybody sees it, please call in.’ They don’t have any idea where their buses are.”

He wondered why RTD does not buy a commercial, over-the-counter vehicle-locator system to keep track of its buses.

Veteran drivers also were not surprised to learn of the earlier mix-up among dispatchers.

“The place is run like it was 20 or 30 years ago--everything is done by paper and voice,” said one driver. He said that in the background of radio transmissions, drivers often can hear dispatchers yelling to each other about lost and broken-down buses.

Leahy, the RTD assistant general manager, said a new system should be operating in two years.

In the meantime, he said, RTD employees will be told again to make every effort to get help to buses in trouble as soon as possible.

“We’re going to emphasize the need for our employees to seek help as fast as possible,” he said, “and when they communicate with another party, to make sure they get feedback to make sure they communicated properly.”

BACKGROUND

Rapid Transit District bus drivers have two ways of requesting emergency assistance. One is a two-way radio system installed 10 years ago. Drivers complain that radios often break, and buses are allowed on the road with broken radios during daylight hours. RTD officials concede that the radio system is inadequate for their 2,100-bus fleet. The other system is a silent-alarm system, for life-threatening emergencies. This system, with the touch of a single button, radios the bus’s identification number to RTD headquarters, where dispatchers study schedules to determine the vehicle’s approximate location. Identification numbers also are painted on bus roofs for the benefit of police helicopters.

Transcriptions of Conversations

Wednesday’s deadly bus drama unfolded in part because a confused RTD dispatcher relayed the wrong warning to Los Angeles police.

In the first conversation transcribed below, the driver describes his problem to an RTD bus dispatcher.

In the second, an RTD police dispatcher relays erroneous information to a Los Angeles police operator that a woman with a gun was standing on the street, not riding on the bus.

Driver: Bus 2005 westbound Santa Monica facing Gower. I have a passenger here in the back seat and she’s holding an object that looks like a hand pistol. She’s pointing it toward the front so I don’t know exactly what it is. I don’t want to alarm anybody, so I want to know if I can have security meet me out (on the route).

Dispatcher: OK. Give me the (unintelligible) and direction.

Driver: It’s 419 (Route 4, Schedule 19). Westbound Santa Monica facing Vine.

Dispatcher: Are you still rolling?

Driver: Yes, I’m still rolling.

LAPD Operator: We’ve got an assault that was reported at Vermont and 1st. Correction on the location, Vermont and 91st. You guys gonna handle it?

RTD Police: Well, we’re on the way. But we’re coming from downtown.

LAPD Operator: OK, we’ll go ahead and respond to that.

RTD Police: We’ve got another call if you’re taking calls. A lady waving a gun at Santa Monica and Gower.

LAPD Operator: OK. At Santa Monica and what?

RTD Police: Gower . . . the westbound side of the street there on Santa Monica. No further on it.

LAPD Operator: No description?

RTD Police: No, just a female waving a gun.

LAPD Operator: Southwest corner, right?

RTD Police: It would be the northwest corner.

LAPD Operator: Westbound Santa Monica?

RTD Police: Yeah.