Brickbat: Cold and Callous

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Alecia Lindsay froze to death in Anchorage, Alaska, after a 911 dispatcher failed to send help for over an hour. When a witness called to report Lindsay behaving erratically, including speaking incoherently and lying in the snow in clothes not suited for temperatures below freezing, the operator said help was on the way but logged the call as a disturbance, not a medical emergency. When the witness called back over an hour later, the dispatcher sent police—not paramedics—and the responding officer was the first one to alert EMS. Lindsay died of hypothermia shortly after arriving at the hospital. Her family is now suing for negligence, claiming that the city’s failure to prioritize the emergency directly caused her death from hypothermia.

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