Sheriff: Everything That Could Have Gone Wrong Did Go Wrong

If it could have gone wrong, it did. That's the word from Sarasota County (FL) Sheriff Bill Balkwill in the case of a botched 911 call that left a downed Cessna 150 undiscovered for almost 20 hours last month. The 911 operator who handled the call has been suspended, he says, and has asked to be reassigned.

It all started January 27th, when Cindy Toepfer and her husband, Sheldon, were sitting on their back porch near the Venice (FL) Airport. They heard the aircraft overhead -- but something didn't sound right. Cindy said the engine was sputtering. After living under flight patterns for 20 years, she knew something was wrong. Then she heard -- or rather, felt -- the impact as the Cessna 150 crashed into a thick forest near her home.

So she dialed 911. But instead of getting information pertinent to the accident, the operator gave Cindy the number for the Domestic Air Interdiction office in Riverside (CA). That was around 7:30 pm EST. It wasn't until after relatives of the two men on board reported them missing that a search was finally launched at around 3:00 am EST the next morning.

"It was mishandled by the 9-1-1 operator," Balkwill said at a press conference Thursday. "There should have been more questions asked."

The reason, he said, was the way the operator interpreted the call. "The initial 9-1-1 operator interpreted this information as reported by the citizen as a suspicious aircraft rather than an aircraft in distress," Balkwill said. "The 9-1-1 operator directed the citizen to call an 800 number to report this aircraft incident."

Michael "Larry" Bradshaw and Miguel Hernandez were trapped in the wreckage for almost 20 hours before they were finally discovered. The Sarasota County Coroner says they died on impact, but a lot of local pilots and others are rattled by the amount of time it took to discover the wreckage. All the while, Cindy and Sheldon Toepfer could have provided more information about the downed aircraft -- if only someone had asked.

The Venice Sun-Gondolier reports Balkwill has made the following recommendations after his investigation of the call:

• Automatically, the call taker will contact the Sarasota-Bradenton International Airport tower and Tampa Radar approach.
• Unless a crash is obvious, the 9-1-1 operator will automatically contact the sheriff's aviation and an aviation supervisor will call back the person making the complaint.
• There will be refresher training to all 9-1-1 call takers on airplane incidents, to include same procedures for suspicious planes and plane crashes.

FMI: www.sarasotasheriff.org