Six People Murdered Just Hours After 911 Call

A Hialeah (Fla.) police dispatcher’s judgement not to send police in response to a paranoid man’s 911 call was correct, police officials said Thursday, even though the man shot and killed six people and set his apartment on fire five hours later. The incident raises questions of policy, procedure and decision-making by dispatchers who may not have the training or experience to judge situations that aren’t entirely criminal. Pedro Vargas, 43, may have suffered from psychiatric problems, and last Friday dialed 911 to report feeling threatened. During the 12-minute call, Vargas asked a Hialeah dispatcher to run the registration to a vehicle outside his apartment, and said he was being followed. The dispatcher then spoke to Vargas’ 89 year-old mother Esperanza Patterson, who said she had slipped two Xanax into Vargas’ food to calm him down. During the call, the unnamed calltaker entered the call for dispatch, and another dispatcher actually assigned the incident to two officers. At the end of the call, the mother declined police help, but the dispatcher told her, “I have to send you the unit because he was asking for police.” During several exchanges, the dispatcher pressed the mother to decide if the police should be dispatched. “I cannot make this decision for you,” the dispatcher said. “Do I cancel the call or not?” The mother said that Vargas had left, so the dispatcher told her, “OK, then. I will cancel the call.” The two responding officers were then told to cancel their response. About four hours later, Vargas returned to the apartment with $10,000 in cash, poured gasoline over it and lit it on fire. When the two apartment managers arrived to investigate, Vargas shot and killed them with a handgun. He killed four other people during an eight-hour stand-off with police before officers killed him in a shoot-out. At a news conference today, police spokesperson Carl Zogby said about the 911 call, “All the right questions were asked and answered.” He added that he would not second guess the dispatcher’s judgement in canceling Vargas’ original request for the police. Read more about the 911 call here, and the police defense of the dispatcher here. Download (pdf) the translation of the 911 call here, and listen to the call here.

At a later press conference, Lt. Carl Zogby told reporters, “We cannot force the police upon a situation where they do not want them to come and if we don’t have any evidence whatsoever of anything else going on other than what the mother expressed to us that he was acting very upset and she was worried about that we had no reason to believe that there was any imminent danger.”

“She tells the operator that she’s very frightened about her son’s state of mind but does not mention any violence or violent tendencies, she repeatedly refuses response, police response and clearly expresses on two occasions that Vargas has left,” Zogby said. “He further cleared up, when asked by the 911 operator about her mentioning gas in a canister and she said ‘No, no he’s going to get gas and oil for his car’.”