CHILLICOTHE, Ohio — The Sheriff of Ross County issued an addendum to a death report of a local public official after the Sheriff said miscommunication between a dispatcher and a 9-1-1 caller led to an inaccurate police report.
Sheriff George Lavender said that his office responded to the death of former Chillicothe councilman Bruce Arnold on Saturday. A brief investigation was launched after a woman called 9-1-1 to report that Arnold was in bed and not breathing. When deputies arrived, CPR and NARCAN was administered, but efforts to revive the 68-year-old were not successful. Arnold was pronounced deceased at the local hospital.
In the initial police report, the deputy wrote that the woman told dispatchers that Arnold might have used cocaine.
“Dispatch later advised us that [the caller] told them that Bruce may have taken cocaine ….,” the deputy wrote in his report.
When the woman who called 9-1-1 learned that the report said she accused Arnold of taking cocaine, the Sheriff said she called the Sheriff’s office to clarify. The Sheriff said he launched an administrative review of the call to find out exactly what happened.
“After an administrative review of the 911 [call] for this report, [the caller] stated to the dispatcher ‘it looks like he took cocaine,'” the addendum issued on Monday by Major Mike Preston reads.
And, that’s where things take a turn, the Sheriff said.
Lavender said the phone call cuts out after the word “cocaine,” which led the dispatcher to tell responding deputies that Arnold might have used the drug because she thought that was what the 9-1-1 caller was telling her. In reality, the Sheriff said the phone had cut out before the woman could finish her sentence.
“The audio is then inaudible, and then you hear ‘sweet and low.’ The dispatcher asks [the caller] to repeat, however, as a result of the stress of the situation, [the caller] does not repeat herself.”
When it was all said-and-done, the deputy wrote in his report what he was initially told by the dispatcher: that Arnold might have used cocaine.
The Sheriff supplied the 9-1-1 audio to the Guardian on Monday after concerns were raised about the possible error in the Sheriff’s report. The Guardian has uploaded the referenced portion of the call for readers to listen for themselves.
The Sheriff’s addendum said that Arnold was a reported diabetic and that the woman had fed the man a sugar substitute to try to revive him from — what she believed might have been — a diabetic emergency.
“On a review of [the deputy’s] bodycam, [the caller] tells [the deputy] that she had put Sweet-and-Low in Mr. Arnold’s mouth as she thought he may be having [a] diabetic attack.”
Despite the Sheriff’s addendum, Arnold’s death was still listed as an overdose in the initial report and NARCAN was used.