Salt Lake dispatchers honored for calmness under fire

The first call seemed like any other that David Wagstaff would answer on the night shift as a 911 dispatcher for the Salt Lake City Police Department.

"We get shots-fired calls every now and then. It seemed kind of basic," he said. "Then we realized that someone had been shot."

In an instant, they were plunged into confusion and chaos as the phone lines lit up with panicked callers describing the shooting rampage at the Trolley Square mall. Some of those police and fire dispatchers relived their moments in interviews with the Deseret Morning News Thursday as they were being honored by the Salt Lake City Council for their brave calm in the crisis.

"I immediately broadcast that we had a shooting," said Ilias Politis, who dispatched officers to the mall over the radio. "I got my initial officers to the scene and then the updates started coming in that the gunman was still in the mall shooting."

Wagstaff said he answered a call that made him stop.

"I got one of the calls that he (the shooter) was running through the mall with a shotgun," he said. "My heart kind of dropped. I remember thinking that things were going to get worse. I was beginning to get nervous about it and the lines were lighting up and I just knew I had to move to the next call."

Flooded with calls

When the calls rapidly started coming in, Sue Fleck was working the service channel, looking up routine warrant and driver's license information.

"I signed into the phone and started answering calls because our lines were just nonstop," she said.

Police and fire dispatchers said they answered hundreds and hundreds of calls in just a few hours that night. So many calls flooded the 911 lines that other dispatch centers handled the overflow.

The dispatchers said their adrenaline kicked in and they began focusing more intensely on getting information and giving it out to police officers, paramedics and firefighters.

JoAnn Ryan said she tried to reassure panicked callers.

"We tried to assure them that help was coming and to just stay where they were, because we didn't know where they were," she said. "If they were in a safe place, just stay there until we got them."

Scott Freitag was supervising the fire department's call center when the shooting began.

"We were getting conflicting information that there were multiple gunmen, multiple people down, including children," he said.

Wagstaff, who has been a dispatcher for only a couple of years, said the emotional calls started to affect him.

"I almost broke down myself. I know a couple of others did, too. I just remember thinking, 'We just need to keep taking more and more calls and tell them what is going on,"' he said.

Ryan said she received a call from a woman hiding inside a store who spied off-duty Ogden police officer Ken Hammond.

"We didn't know at the time that he was an off-duty officer. All she told us is there was another man with a gun," she said. "She was so scared she could barely speak."

Hammond's wife, Sarita, is a police dispatcher in Weber County. She called 911 from the Rodizio Grill to give dispatchers a description of his clothing. Police said she saved her husband from being shot by uniformed officers in the confusion.

Over the police radio, Politis said he heard the words: "Multiple shots! 9-1! Man down!"

"The situation was being called a 9-1. It basically means officer needs help," he said.