EMS workers in Detroit say they were directed to fudge reports about a seriously delayed response to a west-side shooting scene April 2, Charlie LeDuff reports at Fox 2.
The incident was a high-profile one, with two Detroit cops shot and wounded after a task force boxed in 23-year-old murder suspect Matt Joseph's car at Linwood and Hooker.
LeDuff reports:
Detroit EMS is a joke, a deadly joke. The cops know that. That is why they transported the fallen officers in their cars. But it is so bad that an ambulance wasn't dispatched to tend to the suspect bleeding in the front seat for two-and-a-half hours.
Joseph died at the scene. Two medical technicians tell LeDuff what happened later, as he recounts on the station's website:
"They were asking me to falsify documentation," said Detroit EMT Kelly Adams. . . . "We never made the scene because they stopped us mid way there and then told us to turn around."
"But on the paperwork they wanted you to say what?" I asked.
"To confirm it was a DOS," Adams said."So they wanted you to confirm that dead on scene, but you'd never been there. So they wanted you to fake some paperwork," I asked.
"That's what it's sounding like," Adams said.
An EMS union steward, Jeff Gaglio, reinforces Adams' account:
"They were sent to fire headquarters to falsify documentation, to just do a report without making patient contact. . . . Nobody wants to get caught up in this stuff. Everybody wants to cover themselves and just wash their hands of everything and just move on."
Adams tells the reporter she recorded the conversation with supervisors.
