Viberg was on the phone with Wamsley for 32 minutes in one conversation. She said Saturday she wished Wamsley had admitted he had used methamphetamine. She said she could have corrected some of his delusions by saying, “Mike, that’s the drugs talking.”
Dan Peterson, who heads Sarpy County’s 911 center, said his dispatchers did marvelous work that night.
“She’s trying everything in her power,” Peterson said of Viberg. “Nothing worked. The drugs are the problem here.”
In an earlier call, a Douglas County dispatcher had a gruff conversation with Wamsley. Wamsley said, “We’re out by all the gravel pit, out from like 75th and Poppleton.”
Recognizing the absurd contradiction, the dispatcher said, “OK. I can’t help you if I don’t know where you are. . . . OK, you’re going to need to find out what is the closest street to you so I can send you some help. . . . We’ve already been to 75th and Poppleton - we couldn’t find you. . . . I can’t help you unless you can help yourself, OK?”
Mark Conrey, director of Douglas County’s 911 system, said he understood the dispatcher’s tone and her directive to find the closest street.
“She was frustrated and she was trying to bring the person to the reality that they had better focus on what they’re doing if they’re going to get help,” Conrey said. And if you’re in Omaha, as Wamsley contended, you should be near an intersection, Conrey said. So the dispatcher’s suggestion was valid, he said.
Conrey said Douglas County dispatchers took a total of 124 calls between 12:15 a.m. and 1:45 a.m. on Jan. 5, the time in which the first calls from the couple came in.
“She wasn’t as polite as maybe she could have been,” Conrey said of the dispatcher. But under the circumstances, he said, “I don’t think we could have handled the call in any other manner.”
McMurray said good dispatchers must use all their wits to try to solve a problem. “If you’ve got somebody that’s hallucinating, that causes a layer of complexity that’s very difficult to deal with,” he said. “Sometimes you have to be very firm. Sometimes you have to put the burden on them.”
Conrey said operators used various strategies, asking the same questions over and over, attempting to reason with the couple, trying to be forceful with them.
“There’s times you have to scream at the person,” he said. “You have to get their attention.”