Should Provo 911 send a call for help?

APCO investigators spent three days in Provo in June, and APCO's report was due back in September. However, it will be delayed until the end of the year because the case investigator was diverted to help with the aftermath of hurricanes Katrina and Rita, APCO spokeswoman Courtney McCarron said.

While they wait, Provo officials, who requested the APCO report, insist residents who call 911 are in good hands — and Ferre believes another tragic error is possible because of conditions at the center.

"I saw we would have another death," she says. "I didn't want to be there when it happened again."

Tough jobs

By one estimate, more than 400,000 people call 911 in the United States every day. Those who field those calls deal with death and danger on every shift.

Centers that handle 911 calls also are swamped by false calls and regularly receive multiple calls from a single traffic accident because everyone with a cell phone wants to help.

Everyone agrees the stress and long hours make the job unusually difficult, so much so that APCO says there is a dispatch staffing crisis throughout the nation, one reason Provo pays its dispatchers more than nearby jurisdictions, said Provo Police Capt. Dave Bolda, who oversees the operation of the dispatch center. A Provo dispatcher earns between $12.29 and $18.35 an hour, about the same as adjacent Orem.

"Dispatchers are extremely special people who deserve everything they can get, and we're trying to be sensitive to them," Bolda said. "They're doing a job not everyone can do."

They occasionally make mistakes, too. In the past month, dispatcher errors have made news in Washington, D.C., Florida, Missouri and Oregon.

On Oct. 1, 2004, a Provo reserve call-taker later terminated for his mistakes took Aston's call and, together with another dispatcher, committed at least nine errors, according to the Ogden investigation. Further conclusions about the case are more difficult to draw because nobody knows exactly when Aston died or why. It's clear he died on Oct. 1, but his body wasn't found for four days, and the medical examiner couldn't find a cause of death or an exact time of death.

Provo officials believe it is likely emergency responders wouldn't have been able to help Aston even if they had been sent to his apartment at 915 N. 500 West instead of to a hospital parking lot across the street at 950 N. 500 West.

The effort of those emergency personnel has been praised by everyone surrounding the case. They searched nearby apartments across the street from Aston's apartment and asked the dispatchers to review a tape of the call and contact other Utah Valley dispatchers to see if a 950 N. 500 West was an address in another city.