For many people, calling 911 means help will arrive promptly to help with virtually any type of emergency, including asthma attacks. Unfortunately for one woman in Omaha, Nebraska, help didn't arrive soon enough when she began suffering from an asthma attack. That delay in help resulted in her death, and now her family is suing. The suit itself was filed against the City of Omaha and Douglas County by the family of Cristine Herek and argues that “Douglas County 911 personnel were negligent in failing to locate Herek in time to save her life.” Attorney Ben White filed the suit on behalf of one of Herek's sons, Angelo Emmanuel, and her estate. The city and county are both named as defendants because much of “Douglas County 911’s funding comes from the city.”Prior to her death on May 17, 2017, Herek, 54, was an administrative worker for Heartland Family Service. The morning of her death, she was “on the front porch of her home at 4327 Erskine St.,” less than a block from the fire station. She called 911 at 12:09 a.m. and told the operator that she was having trouble breathing and thought she might be dying. However, according to the suit, she gave the 911 operator the wrong address. Instead of giving the operator her home address, she accidentally gave them her work address.

Emergency Sign; image courtesy of Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices via Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org

As a result, firefighters and an ambulance rushed to her work address. When they couldn't find her, the 911 staff “tried calling Herek on her mobile number multiple times.” Eventually, they contacted Verizon and traced her number to her home address. Immediately, Omaha police were dispatched to Herek's home. Unfortunately, when they arrived at 1:01 a.m., Herek was dead on her porch.According to the suit, while emergency personnel were looking for Herek, a 911 dispatcher said in a recorded call with an Omaha firefighter, “... it’s pissing me off cause she was...she was being all dramatic, I’m dying, I’m f---ing dying, and she was all dramatic.” The dispatcher was Lynn Noveski and she was the one who handled Herek's initial call. According to phone records, she also told the firefighter, “I’m going to do a cell phone trace, too. If she wants to play the game of (unintelligible), we’ll go knock her door down.”Soon after the incident, Noveski was fired. However, she “appealed and won her job back.” When commenting on her handling of Herek's call, Noveski's attorney, Angela Forss Schmit, said the “911 call center was understaffed and very busy that night, and that Noveski had taken many steps to find Herek.” She added:“In retrospect, she is remorseful over the language that was used in an internal phone call. At all times, she took (Herek’s) call seriously and cared about the well-being of the caller, and took every effort to locate the caller with the tools that she had.”The suit, on the other hand, argues the 911 center didn't do all it could to save Herek. It claims “Noveski and the 911 employees should have realized that Herek had given them the wrong address and should have called Verizon to determine her home address as soon as it became apparent that she was not at the Sahler Street address.” Additionally, White said, “the county failed to adequately staff the 911 center and failed to maintain adequate systems for tracking the location of cellphones that call 911.”The lawsuit is seeking unspecified damages for Herek's pain and suffering, “her funeral expenses and her son’s loss of her care, comfort and companionship.”

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Family of Omahan who died waiting for rescue file wrongful death suit against city, countyLawsuit filed in death of woman waiting for rescue