WINSLOW — The delayed response to an emergency call that resulted in a murder-suicide has prompted municipal officials to review all of the town’s street names and consider changing ones that sound alike.
Town Manager Michael Heavener told the Town Council about the street name review at its meeting Monday night. He said the review comes in response to apparent confusion the night of June 6 when dispatchers sent Winslow police to the wrong address, delaying their arrival to the fatal shooting scene by several minutes.
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Officers were initially sent to 4 Murray Lane, when the emergency was at 4 Marie St.
Heavener asked Police Chief Jeffrey Fenlason and Fire Chief David LaFountain to review available dispatching records “to determine if any corrective action should be taken.”
“Both chiefs concluded the like-sounding street names may have contributed to the confusion around the location of the caller,” Heavener said. “They recommend that one of the street names be changed to avoid future such incidents.”
As a result, both chiefs plan to meet with the Townwide Safety Committee to “identify and correct all like-sounding street names, which will likely result in one or more street names being changed,” Heavener said.
At 7:52 p.m. June 6, Sarah Gordon, 30, of 4 Marie St., called 911 on her cell phone to report that her husband, 32-year-old Nathaniel Gordon, was threatening to kill her. Soon after the call, Nathaniel Gordon gunned down his wife outside their home and drove away, later shooting himself after being chased by Maine State Police on Interstate 95 in southern Maine.
When Sarah Gordon called 911, her call was picked up at the Central Maine Regional Communications Center in Augusta. The dispatcher there apparently misheard her and the Murray Lane address was then passed along to the dispatch center in Waterville, which relayed the information to Winslow officers, according to local radio logs.
It wasn’t until 7:58 p.m. when neighbors began reporting the shooting that officers were redirected to Marie Street. The first Winslow officer arrived there at 8:02 p.m., a full 10 minutes after Sarah Gordon’s initial 911 call.
Waterville Police Chief Joseph Massey has said the mix-up highlighted his frustration with the state’s consolidation of 911 call centers, which resulted in Waterville losing its 911 call center status in 2003. Under the current system, all 911 calls made on cell phones in the Waterville area are routed first to the Augusta dispatch center, while 911 calls made from landlines are first routed to the Somerset County Communications Center in Skowhegan.
Massey has warned that the consolidation has degraded emergency services, leading to a loss of available technology, institutional memory and local knowledge of the area to aid police responses. With 911 calls on cell phones going from Augusta dispatch, to Waterville dispatch, to local officers, there’s a greater chance that mistakes will happen, he said.
In the days following the murder-suicide, Stephen McCausland, spokesman for the Department of Public Safety, said Public Safety Commissioner John Morris had ordered an inquiry into the address confusion.
By late July, however, information pertaining to that inquiry was still not available, according to McCausland.
The Morning Sentinel then filed an open records request for transcripts and audio recordings of the emergency calls. The department refused to release the audio recordings, citing state law, but is creating transcripts of the recordings. The transcripts had not yet been released as of Monday.
Winslow police have not received transcripts of the emergency calls from the Department of Public Safety either, according to Fenlason. As a result, Fenlason said he and LaFountain relied on their own incident logs and “firsthand experience” in recommending the Marie-Murray name change, instead of “actual documentation” from the public safety department.
“I think this should be reviewed periodically anyway,” Fenlason said.
Code Enforcement Officer Frank Stankevitz headed up the local effort at changing addresses in 2004 to comply with Enhanced-911 requirements for no duplicate street names in the same zip code, new address numbers and other changes. The changes were made so emergency responders could more easily and quickly get to calls, he said.
While the vast majority of changes in Winslow were new address numbers, there were also new names, including changing Wyman Road Extension to Wyman Bog Road; Fuller Lane to Fuller Drive; splitting Garand Street into North Garand and South Garand; and changing one of two Boston avenues to Hollingsworth Street.
But Stankevitz says more changes are needed.
“I’ve advocated that from the beginning, that we should be changing the names so that there were no phonetically-sounding alike names,” he said. “We have Marie Street and Murray Lane, and we have Charlotte Street and Charland Street, and we have one called Private Drive — how many Private Drives are there around?
“We start getting into these names that sound alike and it can be a mix-up very easily,” Stankevitz said, “especially when there’s an emergency going on and people’s adrenaline gets flowing.”
At Monday night’s council meeting, councilor Roland Michaud questioned how a trained dispatcher could confuse the two roads, but he concluded that such mix-ups “will always happen” in minor and serious cases.
Councilor Paul Manson said the confusion was understandable, given that Sarah Gordon “was under extreme emotional distress” when she called 911.
“I think the dispatchers did all they could do,” Manson said.
Scott Monroe — 861-9239
smonroe@centralmaine.com
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