Wonderful Christmas Story 9-1-1 Related

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http://www.journalstar.com/articles/2006/01/08/local/doc43c057443adfd230457734.t\

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The Lincoln Journal Star

Lange-Kubick: Here's a police incident report worth reading

Sunday, January 08, 2006

The good news and the bad news come in on the

same form. It’s called an employee incident

report, says Mark , third-shift supervisor

at the 911 Center, down in the basement of the

Hall of Justice on South 10th Street.

It’s just a piece of paper that lands in a

supervisor’s basket ­ and eventually in the file

of the employee who messed up. Or did good.

The incident Mark wants to talk about began at

0100 Christmas morning. Ellis took the

call. Roby was listening in. ’s only

been at the 911 Center for two months, so she’s still in training.

This call came in on the non-emergency line. It

was a woman from Crete. She’d taken in two kids

late on Christmas Eve, a 14-year-old boy and his

5-year-old sister. Their dad had been arrested and there was no mom around.

Now the little girl wouldn’t go to sleep. She was

afraid Santa wouldn’t be able to find her at this strange house.

The woman was worried, too. She didn’t have presents. Could someone help?

Any other day of the year the dispatchers might

have helped her. They have phone numbers for the

City Mission and the Lincoln Action Program and

they know the police officers who organize the Santa Cop Christmas giveaway.

But, geez, it was 1 o’clock in the morning. Christmas morning.

“She seemed kind of desperate,” remembered

last week at the start of her overnight shift.

“She was concerned for the little girl.“

was, too. And .

They hung up their phones and looked at each other. What could they do?

’s been at the center for more than four

years. The overnight dispatch crew is a pretty tight group.

They sit in front of a bank of monitors with big

maps of the city on the walls they take calls

from people threatening suicide and people who

are hurting. Earlier that day, they’d taken a

call from a family whose baby had suffocated in his crib.

“We’re here for the worst moments in people’s lives,” said.

This wasn’t a fire or a medical emergency, but it

was a trauma, just the same. And they wanted to help.

and started to pass the word down their side of the room.

There’s a little girl and her brother about to miss Christmas.

That, Mark says, is when his employees turned into Santa’s elves.

They made some phone calls. They knew the police

chaplain had Teddy bears. Shara Scattergood

tracked him down at a fire and recruited an officer to go grab the bears.

The City Mission was still open and had a few

things to offer. Cary Steele found $10 in her

wallet. Other people started pulling money out of

their pockets. found Mark’s stash of candy

canes and put it on the table.

How about a 911 T-shirt for the teenager, Troy

Cordle asked. It went on the table too.

volunteered to go home and get some gifts

from under her tree and bring them back.

A police captain who heard the story dropped off

a few toys she had at work. Another dispatcher,

Jen DeBusk, had a couple of kids’ books with her.

came back with a bag of presents, plus wrapping paper and cookies.

In the end, they wrapped a Spider-Man DVD and a

Burger King gift card, a handheld video game and

$15, along with that T-shirt for the 14-year-old.

For his little sister who couldn’t sleep they

wrapped two Little Pony’s and an Alice in

Wonderland DVD, a big frilly Teddy bear and a Dr. Bubbles bath set.

They threw in the candy canes and the cookies, the books and some Silly Putty.

“We were all excited,” said . “The more we did the more we wanted to do.“

stayed in touch with the woman from Crete.

She started to cry when they told her what they’d done.

By 0300 the gifts were in a sheriff’s cruiser,

lined up by Becky Lyons, on its way to the Saline County line.

A few days later Shara and Becky wrote

commendations, praising their fellow co-workers for what they did that night.

The employee incident reports ended up in Mark’s basket.

“Opportunities like this don’t happen very

often,” the supervisor said, “and they stepped up to the plate.”

And everyone who worked Christmas night now has a

white piece of paper in their permanent files.

An employee incident report for doing good at Christmas.

Reach Lange-Kubick at 473-7218 or clangekubick@...