NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WTVF) — It's happened again.
There's been another medical emergency at the Riverbend Maximum Security Prison where employees failed to know the required security protocol.
And this latest incident caused another lengthy delay in getting an ambulance to the prison.
If this sounds familiar, that's because we told about another similar issue at Riverbend just a couple of weeks ago, involving death row inmate Christa Pike.
We were not expecting to be reporting on this sort of problem, especially so soon after the Department of Correction came under fire after it happened the first time.
But now despite all of the earlier media scrutiny, it's now happened two times in less than a month.
The call for help came in Saturday morning, October 17, just after 9 a.m.
The caller shared, "We have an inmate that needs an ambulance."
But it would take 19 more minutes for the staff at Riverbend prison to finally get that ambulance, after one delay after another by prison employees.
The Riverbend worker at first had no idea what the prison's address was and spent nearly a minute trying to find it.
Then, after the dispatcher asked what the problem was, the prison employee transferred him to someone's voicemail.
You can hear the dispatcher's surprise when he exclaimed, "What?!"
So the dispatcher called back. But it didn't get any better.
This time the Riverbend prison employee put the 911 dispatcher on hold and he was stuck listening to hold music for a full minute.
We finally hear that an inmate is in apparent cardiac arrest.
"He's got no pulse. They're doing CPR," the prison employee reported.
But in order to send any sort of emergency response to the state prison, the prison has to give a certain code over the phone, a security protocol required to prevent fakes calls and escapes and protect the lives of fire and ambulance crews. But the employees working that morning didn't know the code.
The prison employee suggested, "It's a code 4 medical emergency."
The dispatcher replied, "No, that's not what I'm asking."
In fact, the prison employee didn't even seem to know what the security protocol was all about.
She admitted at one point, "We don't know the codes. Give me a minute."
But the dispatcher quickly replied, "No, no, no. I'm not calling back again. I'm trying to verify the code which is standard procedure in emergencies at the prison."
“Yes, sir, and that’s what I’m going to get,” the prison employee answered.
For two minutes then the dispatcher sat on hold. The prison employee came back briefly, only to ask, "Give me one moment please, ok?"
And she put the 911 dispatcher back on hold.
He whistles under his breath in response.
You can only imagine what's going through his head by this point as he then has to sit through yet another minute of hold music.
The prison employee finally jumped back on the call, thinking she has found the code. But, it's not even close.
It's now 9:13.
And the dispatcher is again, you guessed it, back on hold for more than two minutes.
Meanwhile, on the emergency radio traffic channels, you can hear the chatter between the fire and ambulance units and dispatch as they keep seeking updates on whether the verified codes have been given yet as they continue to standby, waiting for clearance to enter the prison grounds.
What is so surprising here is that this happened just two weeks after the Department of Correction had come under fire for another similar delay following Christa Pike's botched execution, when a TDOC administrator called 911 but did not know the security code or was even aware that one was required. It took more than 25 minutes for someone to call back with that code.
PREVIOUS RELATED REPORTING:
TDOC failed to notify the public and law enforcement for hours after inmate prison escape
In the October 17 incident, it took 19 minutes for the prison to finally get the correct code.
Less time, but still too long in an emergency.
By the time medics got to the inmate, he had already passed away. Would it have made a difference in saving his life if there had not been the delay? We don't know.
Here's what we do know about the young man. His name was Corrion Partee and he was 24 years old. The Memphis native was in the middle of a 9 year sentence for aggravated robbery. His cause of death, we are told, is still pending.
We did have all sorts of questions for the Department of Correction about this latest failure, like how did this happen? And what's being done to make sure it doesn't happen again? Mind you, it's now been more than two weeks since it happened.
We got a single sentence reply from TDOC that said, "I can only tell you that we are still reviewing the incident."
