EMS changes methods after possible tipoff
Officials tackle glitches that led to medics being at Mark Conditt’s door.
Austin-Travis County Emergency Medical Services officials have established new ways of handling requests from law enforcement to be on standby while officers carry out secretive and potentially dangerous arrests or searches — the result of missteps that might have tipped off the Austin bomber that his house was under surveillance.
EMS officials said Tuesday that the changes will address communication breakdowns that led to two medics for the Pflugerville Fire Department knocking on Mark Conditt’s door, even as officers planned a raid to arrest him there.
Conditt was away from the house March 20, and a team of officers was waiting for him to return about 4 p.m. The ambulance was supposed to be standing by in the area, should someone be injured during the raid.
But instead of parking and waiting, the firefighters knocked on the door and spoke to one of Conditt’s roommates, who told them no one in the house needed help. Some law enforcement officers, who had worked around the clock to find the bomber, were incensed and feared their work had been compromised.
EMS officials say they are still looking into the matter, which they said was the result of an unusual request in an unprecedented case.
But they have also taken immediate steps to prevent it from happening again. “It wasn’t a mistake by the Pflugerville Fire Department at all,” EMS Chief of Staff Jasper Brown said. “It had to do with how they were dis
patched, the speed of the dispatch and the unusual way the call came to us. There were some learning oppor- tunities for us.”
The American-Statesman and KVUE-TV revealed the communication gap the day after the bomber killed himself using an explosive in his car as police closed in along Interstate 35 in Round Rock.
On Tuesday, EMS officials expanded on what went wrong, saying that, based on their understanding of the sequence of events, an Austin police investigator at the bombing command center asked a communications supervisor to place an ambulance on standby near Conditt’s home.
A specialized EMS crew usually responds to such calls. But EMS spokesman Mike Benavides said on March 20, the supervisor asked if that team should be sent and was told no. The supervisor and dispatchers then created a nonemergency medical call in the computer system, which routed the request to Pfluger- ville because Conditt’s house was in its coverage area, Benavides said. The super- visor immediately called the Pflugerville Fire Department to explain why its crew was needed and to advise the crew to not approach the home.
But by the time dispatchers relayed those instructions, the crew had already arrived at the home, talked to one of Conditt’s roommates and left.
Benavides said such a call would normally go to the specialized crew, which communicates and coordinates via telephone with police to avoid addresses being typed into dispatch records until after a police mission has started.
“We have never done that for surveillance only,” he said. “The normal process was bypassed, not intentionally.”
Brown said that, in the future, law enforcement requests for an ambulance to be on standby won’t be
automatically entered into a dispatching computer system so that communications supervisors can verify how a police agency wants the call handled.
They also won’t enter a suspect’s exact address into the system to avoid confusion.
Brown also said that EMS has created a specialized type of call in its dispatching system that will prevent it from being automatically routed to another agency in Travis County that operates ambulances. Instead, such requests will remain inside Austin-Travis County EMS. “Hopefully, we won’t have situations like this in the future,” Brown said. “We certainly don’t want to be going to anybody’s house we aren’t supposed to be for our safety and everybody else’s.”