A man died after his family’s calls to 911 went unanswered.
The Fox 8 I-Team investigated the incident after Vince Frusteri’s family got no answer at the Cuyahoga County dispatch center shortly after 4 a.m. last Thursday (November 5).
“I’m heartbroken,” Cheryl Frusteri told Fox 8. “I don’t have words. My husband’s gone. He’s gone.”
Cheryl Frusteri and another relative tried calling 911 when Vince Frusteri needed help for a medical emergency, and when they couldn’t get through, tried calling University Hospitals in Parma.
“What’s going through my mind is, like, how can nobody answer 911?” Cheryl Frusteri said. “I was terrified. I was petrified. It’s 911, for Pete’s sake.”
The Fox 8 I-Team dug into how the incident happened.
The station reported Monday (November 9) that hospital staff alerted police and paramedics to Vince Frusteri's medical emergency, a recording shows.
The I-Team also pulled a police report that shows that a dispatcher tried calling the family back about two hours after their calls to 911, but it was too late.
Cuyahoga County officials told the I-Team that the problem happened because a power distribution unit to the 911 center failed, and Fox 8 noted that it took nearly an hour and a half to divert the calls to functional lines.
“We are working with our vendors to address the problem so that it does not occur again, including additional redundancies (back-ups),” county officials said. The county also said the 911 system is fully functional again.
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