May 12 (UPI) — The mother of a 6-month-old boy who died after his baby sitter was unable to reach 911 in Dallas on her Metro PCS is suing the cellphone carrier’s parent company T-Mobile.
Bridget Alex is seeking damages and other monetary relief in a 24-page lawsuit filed in the 101st Dallas County district.
On March 11, Brandon rolled off a day bed on the floor. The sitter called 911 three times on her cellphone and was on hold for 40 minutes.
The baby sitter, who didn’t have a car, reached the mother, who came home and rushed Brandon to the hospital. The baby was pronounced dead after being transferred to another hospital. The cause of death hasn’t been determined, the Collin County Medical Examiner’s office said.
“While Brandon Alex lay there in distress, struggling to survive, neither police nor EMT ever arrived at Bridget Alex’s apartment to assist Brandon Alex,” the suit states.
In an affidavit, a call taker said that MetroPCS “doesn’t always have addresses.”
The suit alleges that T-Mobile was negligent in failing to program its equipment to automatically send GPS coordinates to 911 operators and ignored warnings about software glitches and obsolete technology from the city Dallas, the Federal Communications Commission and news reports.
So-called “ghost calls” — duplicate calls generated from legitimate 911 calls — have clogged Dallas’ emergency dispatch system for months.
The 911 call center had a spike in calls the night of the baby’s death, the city said.
In April, the Dallas Police Department produced a report that understaffing of emergency call centers was a main cause of slow 911 response times during several months in 2016 and 2017, including in March when Brandon Alex died.
Why are there so many abandoned calls?
“Because they’re impatient,” Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings said to KDFW-TV one week after the child died. “If you don’t get someone who says we’re putting you on hold, please hang on. The rings keep going, people hang up, and I’ll try again.
But he added, “We’re going to fix this. We’ve got a new sheriff in town, [Dallas City Manager] T.C. Broadnax, and we’re going to get this fixed,” Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings said. “I’m hopeful though, that the rest of City Hall can learn from this.”
On May 2, T-Mobile wrote to Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office detailing how it was “incorrectly” blamed by the city for the 911 problems.
“The city commented publicly that there were what it termed ‘ghost calls’ being placed to the 911 system from T-Mobile’s network,” Stephanie Clouston wrote Attorney General Ken Paxton in a letter obtained by The Dallas Morning News. “The ‘ghost calls,’ however, were actually abandoned or unanswered calls.”
