By Gene Warner
The Buffalo News
CHEEKTOWAGA, N.Y. — A woman screaming for help as fire ripped through her Cheektowaga home early Wednesday morning called 911 on her cell phone, but an outdated local 911 system led to a 15-minute gap before police responded to the fire that killed three people.
Found in their Hyland Road home, near Buffalo Niagara International Airport, were fire victims Mohammad Ansari, 60; Faaiza Ansari, 25; and Saaiba Ansari, 22.
Authorities believe that Mohammad was the father of the two young women. Faaiza Ansari was a University at Buffalo medical student, while her sister was a UB undergraduate majoring in mechanical engineering.
All three were pronounced dead at the scene, a one-story home at 305 Hyland, located to the rear of 303 Hyland.
Police officials say they have found no sign of any human error in the delayed response to the first phone call.
The original call, made to 911 at 2:56 a.m., was routed to Buffalo, then Depew and finally to Cheektowaga because of the way that cell phone calls are handled, police said. The first patrol car reached the scene at 3:13 a.m.
“Ideally, we like to have a response time of a whole lot shorter than 15 minutes,” Cheektowaga Police Capt. John A. Glascott said. “Due to the circumstances created by the system, it took us about 15 minutes to get a police car to a very dangerous situation.”
Here was the sequence of events, according to Cheektowaga police:
*The call for help was made at 2:56 a.m., but because it was from a cell phone, it was routed to Buffalo. And the screaming woman did not stay on the line long. “They lost contact with the cell phone, but the information they had was that the woman was screaming, from either 303 or 305 Hyland,” Glascott said.
*Authorities quickly determined that the cell phone signal was relayed through a tower located in Depew, so Depew police were called at 3:02 a.m. Part of Hyland is located in Depew.
*Depew dispatchers determined that the address was in Cheektowaga, so they called Cheektowaga police at 3:04 a.m.
*The card was “punched” into the Cheektowaga computer system at 3:07 a.m. The call, to check the condition of a screaming woman, then was dispatched to patrol cars at 3:09 a.m. Four minutes later, the first car arrived at the scene.
While authorities emphasized that the different agencies’ clocks may not be synchronized, they acknowledged that at least 15 minutes elapsed between the call from the screaming woman and the first police car arriving at the scene.
Cheektowaga police officers went to the front house, at 303 Hyland, and found no woman screaming and no apparent trouble before they proceeded to the rear house, where they smelled smoke and found the fire.
No one knows whether a quicker response time could have saved any of the three lives. “We have no way of knowing how long they were deceased when we got there,” Cheektowaga Police Capt. James J. Speyer said. “Obviously, in a situation like this, time is of the essence, and every minute in our favor helps us. We wish that we would have gotten there sooner.
“We’re very upset that a tragedy like this occurred, and we take it personally.”
Glascott pointed out that no one involved in fielding and rerouting the original call knew the nature of the 911 caller’s emergency.
“We’ve got one report of someone screaming into a cell phone,” he said. “We have no idea that we have a working fire. We have no idea that we have a life-threatening situation. I do not see a single human error in this situation.”
Glascott, who ran for Erie County sheriff this year, then talked about the larger problem. “What I’m seeing is an old 911 system that has not caught up with 2009 technology, and that led to a delay in our providing emergency services,” he said. “We’ve talked about needing to improve the 911 system for quite some time. We need to do a better job of routing calls to proper agencies from cell phones. Many people do not have land-line phones in their home.”
Once they arrived at the scene, Cheektowaga police carried the man out of the one-story house, located between George Urban Boulevard and the airport.
“When I got there, the police were already pulling the gentleman from the side door, and there was a lot of smoke coming from the eaves,” Hy-View Fire Chief Jeffrey R. Glinski said. “We didn’t see any fire at first.”
Firefighters led by the Hy-View company broke the windows to gain entry and then noticed fire coming from the bedroom windows. Knowing that there may have been three people trapped inside, firefighters began looking for other victims and found the two women.
“They were found in a back bedroom lying on the floor,” Glinski said. “From what I was told, there was no hope for them.”
Outside the home, Rural/Metro Medical Services emergency personnel worked on Mohammad Ansari, but he also was pronounced dead at the scene.
More than 50 volunteer firefighters from Hy-View, U-Crest, Forks and Depew spent between an hour and an hour and a half bringing the fire under control. The fire gutted the home, but no damage estimate or cause was available late Wednesday.
“At this point, it does not appear that it was a suspicious fire,” Speyer said at the scene, in a comment he repeated Wednesday afternoon.
Emergency workers at the scene not only braved early morning temperatures in the high teens, but they also had to cope with the deaths of three people just two days before Christmas.
“It’s definitely not easy, especially this time of the year,” Glinski said. ". . . Families are so important.”
News Staff Reporter Peter Simon contributed to this report.
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