Deseret Morning News
Copyright 2007 The Deseret News Publishing Co.
OGDEN, Utah — The recently released recordings of emergency calls from Trolley Square on Feb. 12, the night a young gunman killed five people and wounded four before he was killed by police, are haunting. Terrified callers, some of them calling from storage rooms, bathrooms and restaurant kitchens, flooded the dispatch center with calls for help. Dispatchers handled approximately 641 calls in the two hours after the shooting started. Some of the calls included people who had friends and loved ones in the mall.
Through it all, the dispatchers calmly and competently took the calls, advising mall shoppers and employees to lock doors, avoid windows and stay put until police could assist them. Perhaps most importantly, they reassured callers that police had the situation well in hand. “We’re doing all we can,” one dispatcher told a caller. “We’re going to get it taken care of.”
One of the most important calls came from Sarita Hammond, wife of Ogden police officer Ken Hammond, who helped end the siege. She called to tell dispatchers that her husband was an off-duty police officer who was carrying his gun and that he was responding to the incident. Although a dispatcher initially talked over her, they eventually established Hammond’s identity and what he was wearing. Otherwise, Ken Hammond would have been at grave risk of being fired on by police. Sarita Hammond herself is a police dispatcher in Weber County.
The telephone calls also aided police in pinpointing shooter Sulejman Talovic’s location in the mall, which helped to put a prompt end to the ordeal. Long after the siege ended, some people remained in hiding in the mall. Dispatchers also assisted in guiding police to their locations.
On an “ordinary” day (if there’s such a thing in that line of work), dispatchers do very much the same thing as they assist people who have been involved in traffic accidents, experienced house fires or have been victims of crime. But the scale of this event, handling hundreds of calls in a short time span, was a profound test of their skill and compassion. The audio recordings, which are available at the Deseret Morning News Web site, deseretnews.com, are a testament to that.
While much has been said of the police officers who ended this massacre, the dispatchers played an integral role in aiding their response and keeping hundreds of other people safe. They, too, distinguished themselves as heroes that night.