Dispatcher glad when events work out well

It was midnight, an hour into his shift, when dispatcher Phil Moody got the call.

As usual he answered, “911. What’s your emergency?”

Moody got no response. He spoke again, but still no answer.

After 14 years with the Maine State Police in Orono, handling the emergencies of people in four counties, Moody was used to getting ghost calls from cell phones. Most of them came from phones whose owners had unknowingly hit the preset emergency number. When the calls came from the inside of a coat pocket, for instance, Moody could often hear the rustle of fabric. When they came from moving cars, he could hear road sounds or the chatter of people who had no idea they had just dialed 911.

Dispatchers get a lot of ghost calls in the cell-phone era, but this was not one of them.

Instead of hanging up, Moody listened for a sound, any sound. Eventually he heard a slight noise on the line and then a woman’s nervous voice. Its faint tone indicated she wasn’t holding the phone, but standing some distance away from it as she spoke.

“Why do you want to kill yourself?” he heard the woman say.

Moody turned to Sue Pelkey, the other dispatcher on duty that October night, and said he had a suicide situation and would need some help tracking it down. Calls from more traditional wired home phones automatically provide dispatchers with information on the whereabouts of the callers. Calls from cell phones literally come out of thin air.

Moody listened again for clues in the woman’s edgy words. He tried to visualize the tense scene at the other end of the line, but it was like following a TV show without a picture to give it context. He was certain of only one thing: A life-and-death drama was being played out somewhere, and the woman who had secretly dialed the number was desperately hoping there was an attentive audience on the other end who could avert a tragedy.

Without exchanging a word with Moody, the woman began feeding him all the information he needed. The woman was evidently talking with her distraught husband, whom she referred to by name more than once for Moody’s benefit, about their failing relationship. She asked her husband why he was walking around the house with a loaded gun. When she complained that their living conditions were just not suitable to her any longer, she managed to include the address of their apartment in a way that would not arouse her husband’s suspicion.

With Pelkey’s assistance, Moody was able to confirm the name of the man and his address on the computer. He alerted the Penobscot County Regional Dispatch Center, which sent a deputy sheriff to the address in Holden. Two state troopers, one from Bangor and one from Ellsworth, raced to the scene as well.

Meanwhile, Moody stayed on the line to monitor the volatile situation. Although he now had the number of the couple’s home phone, he didn’t dare to call the apartment. He wanted to know if there were any children in the house – there were two, it turned out, asleep in a nearby bedroom. He wanted to know more about the man’s state of mind, and whether he had ever attempted suicide before. But Moody knew that any sudden disturbance could provoke the man. So he sat silently instead, hoping that he wouldn’t hear a gunshot – or worse, two of them.

After about 20 minutes, Moody heard the police. They shouted for the man to come out of the house. He did, and was disarmed and taken to the hospital for evaluation. The emergency had passed without incident, and Moody had not even shared a simple “hello” with the caller.

For his handling of that 911 call, Moody, who lives in Brewer, was named this week as the Telecommunicator of the Year by the Maine Chapter of the National Emergency Number Association. He appreciates the honor, of course, and is glad to have been part of the “save” that night. Veteran dispatchers all have stories about domestic disturbance calls that did not go well, so the good ones make their day. But Moody gives most of the credit to the woman who made the call that night – the disembodied voice of a person he’s never met – for the satisfying outcome to a desperate situation.

“She had such an incredible presence of mind to do what she did,” Moody said. “After she punched 911 and set the phone down, all she could do was hope there was someone on the other end who was hearing what she had to say. But she never did know. And it was excruciating for me to have to sit there and hear everything that was going on and not be able to talk with her, to let her know I was there.”

Moody said he doesn’t have any idea what became of the suicidal man and his wife. Dispatchers rarely get a sense of closure about the distress calls they handle once they’ve disconnected from them.

“We get calls from people with medical emergencies, people in dangerous domestic situations, people who are hysterical about problems that are all-consuming to them at that moment,” Moody said. “And while there are times when we cannot get them everything they need, it always feels good when things work out well.”