Ignored 911 Call Sparks $1M Lawsuit

Filed Over Detroit Dispatcher's Response To A 5-Year-Old Boy's Call

(CBS/AP) 

When he called back later, Patterson said, an operator said: "You shouldn't be playing on the phone."

In a tape of the call broadcast by Detroit-area television stations, the operator said: "Now put her on the phone before I send the police out there to knock on the door and you gonna be in trouble."

Police eventually arrived at the house after the second call, which was placed at 9:02 p.m., but Turner already was dead. EMS never came.

Fieger said what happened to Robert is not an isolated incident. He played a 911 call of a woman he is representing in another lawsuit against Detroit 911 dispatchers.

The woman, Lorraine Hayes, called 911 twice on January 12, 2005, saying that her husband had shot her in the head.

"Had somebody even followed up and sent a policeman like they did on the later call, really, to admonish Robert, rather than to help his mother, perhaps we wouldn't be here," Fieger told The Early Show co-anchor Hannah Storm.

"But no one came at all. All that happened was that Robert was threatened and, really, intimidated from doing what his mother had taught him to do, which was to make an emergency call in an emergency situation."

The dispatcher did not take her seriously, and EMS arrived only after she called her son in Minnesota and he called Detroit police — 45 minutes after Hayes' initial call, according to the lawsuit. Hayes became paralyzed as a result of her injuries.

In the call that Fieger played, a dispatcher asks Hayes: "Are you a mental patient?"

Fieger said the city had denied the existence of the tape. He would not say how he obtained it.

Hayes' lawsuit was filed in October. Both her suit and the Turner suit were filed in Wayne County Circuit Court.