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A 911 dispatcher has been fired after a Tops employee trapped in a Buffalo supermarket during last month’s mass shooting that killed 10 people said he had been hanged.
The Erie County dispatcher was put on administrative leave last month after Latisha Rodgers, an assistant office manager at Tops, told Buffalo News and WGRZ that she called 911 and whispered to the dispatcher in hopes of notifying the officer of the mass shooting. unfolds in the grocery store. But instead of helping at a time when she was “afraid for my life,” Rodgers said the 911 dispatcher fired her in a “very nasty tone.”
“The dispatcher got in and I whispered to her, ‘Miss, please send help to 1275 Jefferson, there’s a shooter in the shop,’ Rogers told WGRZ. “She went on in a very nasty tone and said, ‘I can’t hear you, why are you whispering?’ You don’t have to whisper, they can’t hear you, “so I kept whispering and saying,” Ma’am, he’s still in the store, he’s still shooting! ” I’m afraid for my life, please send help! ‘ Nervously, my phone fell out of my hand, she said something I couldn’t understand, and then the phone hung up. ”
Erie County Executive Director Mark Poloncarz told reporters last month that the county’s intention was to “end a 911 caller who acted completely inappropriately, not following protocol.” A county spokesman confirmed in a statement that a hearing took place on Thursday, at which the dispatcher, identified by Buffalo News as Sheila E. Ayers, was fired eight years later by the Erie County Central Police Department.
“According to the Erie County Department of Personnel, the person who was the subject of a disciplinary hearing earlier today is no longer employed as the author of Erie County police complaints in force this afternoon,” the statement said.
Ayers, 54, did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Washington Post early Saturday.
Prior to the hearing, she told the News that she regretted Rodgers’ experience, while claiming that the Tops employee had changed her story about calling 911 “many times”. She asked the public not to hand down the verdict until more information was available.
“I’m being attacked for one side of the story,” Ayers said.
A spokesman for CSEA Local 815, the union representing the dispatcher, did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Post. Denise Shimura, president of the union, told Buffalo News that he would file a complaint about the termination of Ayers.
The announcement comes the same week when Peyton Hendron, the 18-year-old accused of murder, was charged with 25 counts, including domestic terrorism and murder as a hate crime. Authorities say the alleged white supremacist turned to the Tops supermarket in a predominantly black neighborhood because of his hatred of minorities, fueled by conspiracy theories that are spreading on the Internet.
Hendron, who police say traveled three hours from his home in Conklin, New York, to target blacks with his Bushmaster XM-15 rifle, is believed to have posted a stuck online that reveals a paranoid racist obsession conspiracy theory, according to which white Americans are deliberately replaced by non-white immigrants.
The Grand Jury of Gendron, who pleaded not guilty, returned one indictment for internal terrorism motivated by hatred, 10 charges of first-degree murder as a hate crime, 10 charges of second-degree murder as a hate crime, three the charges of attempted murder of the second degree as a hate crime and one charge of criminal possession of a weapon of the second degree.
Buffalo shooting suspect charged with murder as hate crime, domestic terrorism
If convicted of domestic terrorism motivated by hatred, Hendron will face an automatic sentence of life imprisonment without parole.
As the United States is rocked by a recent series of mass shootings stretching from New York through Texas to Oklahoma, President Biden has called on Congress to take immediate action on gun control. In a speech Thursday, the president called for radical changes to the country’s gun laws, including a ban on assault weapons and restrictions on high-capacity magazines, following recent attacks in Buffalo, a primary school in Uwalde, Texas, and a hospital in Tulsa. The political dynamics in the evenly divided Senate make the chances of these proposals far away.
“I respect the culture, tradition and concerns of legitimate gun owners,” he said. “At the same time, the Second Amendment, like all other rights, is not absolute.
Speaking on June 2 about the recent mass shootings, President Biden said “we need to do something this time” and that the 2nd Amendment “is not absolute.” (Video: The Washington Post, Photo: Demetrius Freeman / The Washington Post)
There have been more than 200 mass shootings in the United States this year, according to the Gun Violence Archives research group. Mass shootings, in which four or more people – excluding the shooter – were injured or killed, are on average more than one a day so far this year. Not a week has passed in 2022 without at least four mass shootings.
Rodgers was standing behind the store’s customer service desk on May 14 when the shooting began. When she bent down to avoid the shooting, she called 911 around 2:30 p.m.
“She’s mad at me, shut me in the face,” Rodgers told the dispatcher in an interview with News. Rodgers told local media that she then called her boyfriend and asked him to call 911.
Following news reports for Rodgers, county officials began investigating her allegations about the dispatcher. Polonkarz, the district’s executive director, told reporters in May that Erie County’s emergency services found the call after reading 911’s mass shooting calls. They believe the alleged actions of the dispatcher are “completely unacceptable,” Poloncarz said.
New York State law suggests that the recording of the call to 911 is unlikely to be released. New York County Act 308 (4), a measure that applies to all counties outside of New York, states that “records, in whatever form, of calls made to the E911 system of the municipality shall not be made available to or received from an entity or person other than the public safety agency of that municipality, another government agency or body, or a private legal entity or person providing medical, ambulance or other emergency services, and must not be used for any commercial purpose, other than the provision of emergency services. “
Rodgers told WGRZ last month that she was initially on the fence for the dispatcher losing her job, but concluded that taking administrative leave was not enough.
“She didn’t understand or care at all and left me dead,” Rodgers said. “I just thank God I’m here because I could have died.”
Shine Jacobs and David Nakamura contributed to this report.
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