A lawsuit filed by the family of a woman who wandered along a snowy New Mexico highway in 2007 with her 15 month-old child is specific: when a passing motorist dialed 911 to report the woman at 3:30 a.m., one Torrance County dispatcher was asleep, the supervisor was watching a TV sitcom on his laptop in an office, and calltaker Jeanine Arnold was working the fourth night of 12-hour shifts. The woman put the child down at some point, and the infant was later found dead in a field. According to depositions, Arnold relayed a wrong location of the motorist to a state police dispatcher, sending troopers 16 miles from the actual sighting. She also didn’t notify her supervisor of the incident, and coded it only as a welfare check, the lawsuit states, instead of something more serious. The wandering woman, Diana Willis, was traveling with a 15 month-old baby, and apparently suffered from psychiatric problems. She pulled off the road and began walking into a field, and at some point she put the child down and continued walking. Troopers didn’t find the woman after a 35-minute search. Willis stumbled into a highway department yard later that morning. However, the lawsuit claims, the sheriff didn’t start a search promptly or focus on the correct area. The child’s body was found the next day about two miles from the highway yard. Arnold was later fired from her dispatcher job. Read more about the lawsuit here.
1 comment… add one
I am curious what the plaintiffs would have liked this call to have been labelled. There was not an obvious medical emergency if the woman were walking down the side of the road with her child. Likewise, there is no legality issue (she is free to walk down the side of a road if she so chooses). Frankly the only issue was that on such a cold night that it was odd to see someone in this condition and it would be kind to check in on them to see if anything could be done for them… that seems the definition of a wellfare check to me.
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