A dying baby, a home in flames and a father in distress: Broward 911 callers cry out for help and no one answers the phones

By Eileen Kelley, Lisa J. Huriash, Brittany Wallman and Spencer Norris
South Florida Sun-Sentinel

It was supposed to be a day full of hope for what the New Year would bring, but it began with a cry for help so guttural it carried throughout the Deerfield Beach house. Keishawn Johnson Jr., not even 3 months old, was turning blue. His mother, full of terror, screamed: “My baby! My baby!”
Cory McNeil, one of many adults staying at the house that included a bed full of sleeping children, grabbed a phone and frantically pounded the numbers 9-1-1. The phone rang and rang and rang — and rang some more — as Darrol “Molly” Glasco continued to scream for someone to help her baby boy.

“Everyone was like, ‘Oh no, no, oh no! Call the ambulance. Call the police,’” McNeil said.
Someone else grabbed a phone. So did a third person. At least three callers dialed 911 and no one answered. One person hung up and tried again. And again. So did others.

Beginning at noon on Jan. 1 and for the next eight or so minutes, no emergency responder spoke to any of the frantic callers.
Records from Broward’s regional 911 communication center, and interviews with 911 callers and current and former county employees, paint a terrifying picture of an emergency response system that is leaving callers in danger. And now a family says their baby is dead because the people responsible for sending emergency workers to life-or-death situations didn’t even answer the phone.

In a months-long investigation, the South Florida Sun Sentinel discovered thousands of unanswered 911 calls and talked to desperate callers who never connected with the help they needed. As alarm about the public safety crisis spreads, fire chiefs and city officials are scrambling. But nothing’s been done — and the 911 call centers remain dangerously understaffed.
Sources privy to how the 911 system operates describe a job where call-takers work 16-hour shifts, not the scheduled 12 hours. And the stresses of being short-staffed are too much for many. Sources say most new hires don’t stick around long, and there have even been times when a worker walked off the job during a lunch break.

Keishawn Johnson Sr., of Deerfield Beach, holds a picture of his son Keishawn, who died on Jan. 1. When no one answered a series of 911 calls about the unresponsive baby on Jan. 1, a desperate Johnson jumped into a friend’s car, trying to administer CPR during the 4-mile trip to Broward Health North, where efforts to revive the baby were unsuccessful. (Carline Jean / South Florida Sun Sentinel)

When no one picked up the 911 calls about the unresponsive baby on Jan. 1, and it was apparent no ambulance with life-saving paramedics would come racing down the street, a desperate Keishawn Johnson Sr. jumped into a friend’s car, leaning over his son, blowing air into the baby’s lungs during the 4-mile trip to Broward Health North.
Had someone picked up one of the 911 calls from the car full of people, the communications operator could have told the 23-year-old father to also do chest compressions — something imperative when doing CPR. Johnson had no idea he was doing CPR wrong, and on the way to the hospital he kept thinking to himself, “This can’t be real. This can’t be real.”
A dire picture of a county in crisis

Johnson is far from alone. And this public safety crisis is no secret to the Broward Sheriff’s Office, which operates three regional 911 call centers for the county.
The emergency 911 phone system logs all the calls, even when the caller hangs up the phone before connecting. The county’s own data paints a dire picture.
Last year, 166,755 callers hung up before connecting with a call-taker. The number of abandoned calls — which includes accidental misdials — has steadily increased over the past three years, the data shows. Abandoned calls increased 26% from 2019 to 2021, the South Florida Sun Sentinel found.
The activity in February, the most recent report available, provides a look into the phone-ringing chaos of the 911 system in Broward.
That month, there were 14,505 abandoned calls, according to the county’s reports. That doesn’t compare favorably to past Februarys — the grim trend has only gotten worse.

According to the county, emergency call-takers should answer the phone within 10 seconds at least 90% of the time during the busiest hour of the day. The Sheriff’s Office’s 10-second goal is based on a longtime national standard, which was loosened in 2020 to 15 seconds.
The call center failed to meet the 10-second goal on 13 of the 28 days in February, the records show.
Still, February was the first time since September that the county hit that benchmark for at least half of the month. The county met its target on just five days in December.
For example, on Feb. 6, 230 calls came in between 5 and 6 p.m., the busiest hour for emergency calls that day. Just 80 — about one in three — were handled within the 10-second benchmark.

Data shows that the quality of service for 911 rapidly deteriorated at the end of 2021 and that problems persisted into the new year. The problem hit its zenith in December 2021, when nearly 30,500 calls were never connected to an operator.
A Broward Sheriff’s Office spokeswoman downplayed the problems, but acknowledged staffing shortages, problems with retention, and the impact that COVID surges had on their operations.
“The COVD-19 pandemic has certainly had negative effects on public safety institutions, with PSAPs [911 centers] clearly not immune to unexpected, dramatic and impactful staffing losses,” said Veda Coleman-Wright, a spokeswoman for the Broward Sheriff’s Office. “However, despite these obstacles, the regional system does provide call answer times that routinely meet industry best practices.”
The agency released statistics this week to the Sun Sentinel highlighting an average phone pickup of one minute or less on most calls. Those figures ignore the thousands of times a person in an emergency never reached a call-taker at all.
Coleman-Wright acknowledged how terrifying that must be to somebody in a crisis.
“As seconds tick by, it can seem like an eternity to someone experiencing one of the worst moments of their life,” Coleman-Wright said. “The dedicated members who work in our Department of Regional Communications understand this, and that’s why 911 operators and dispatchers work with the utmost care, speed and diligence in answering the [phones].”

Records show Keishawn and his father arriving at the hospital 13 minutes after the first call to 911 was not answered. Life-saving measures — intravenous drugs, a defibrillator to restart the baby’s heart, tubes to open his windpipe — were too late, records show. At 12:33 p.m., a half-hour after the flood of 911 calls started, Keishawn Donnel Johnson Jr. was pronounced dead. The 12-pound baby was 12 days shy of turning 3 months old.
“Your son didn’t make it,” a hospital doctor told Johnson. Johnson said his world began to spin and he begged doctors to take his own heart and give it to his son.
“They are supposed to be there to provide support — to serve and protect us that day. But there was no one to serve or protect. My son didn’t get served or protected,” Johnson said. He said a sheriff’s deputy asked him why he didn’t call 911 so paramedics could help his child on the way to the hospital and get him there quicker. The question stung.
“I still can’t believe it happened. [The detectives] looked at me and were like ‘Are you sure no one answered?’ I believe my son would still be here today if they answered. But the fact is, nobody answered.”
‘This never should have happened. We need more people’

Some 2.2 million calls come into the regional call center a year. About half of them are non-emergency calls. The Broward Sheriff’s Office Regional Communications center is responsible for taking 911 and non-emergency calls for all municipalities in Broward except Coral Springs and Plantation, which never joined the regional system.
Other municipalities could break away as frustration mounts with unanswered calls, the Sun Sentinel has learned.