Lack of emergency response to unresponsive Vallejo motorist alarms bystanders

VALLEJO – Emergency medical services did not respond to a 911 call for nearly an hour for a man who was found unresponsive in his vehicle in a highway median in Vallejo on Friday in an incident that has raised questions about the city’s ability to respond to emergencies. 

A Vallejo Fire Department spokesperson told the Vallejo Sun that firefighters and medical personnel were waiting for police to respond, who were busy with another call. But officers, who have struggled with long response times, never showed up.

Another motorist, Philip Samano, first called 911 about the unresponsive driver after he noticed a red Hyundai pulled partially into the median on Highway 29 near Meadows Drive at around 2:30 p.m. on Friday and stopped to check on the driver, who was passed out behind the wheel with the doors locked and the vehicle running.

Samano also posted a video of the car on social media calling for friends or family members of the man to come and help. 

“This poor guy is passed out,” Samano said in his video on the social media post. “His stomach is moving so he is breathing, we called 911 so they should be on the way but if it’s somebody you know come and check up on a family member.”

The post received a flood of responses expressing concern for the driver’s safety and thanking Samano for calling 911. According to his social media posts, Samano waited near the car for about 50 minutes. 

According to the Vallejo Fire Department spokesperson Kevin Brown, dispatchers had classified the call as one that required police officers to clear the scene before emergency medical services could respond. Brown said that police officers were on another priority call when the call about the unconscious driver went out over dispatch.

Yet dispatchers sent a member of Vallejo’s crisis intervention team IHART at about 3:10 p.m.  A Solano County Sheriff’s Office animal control officer also stopped their vehicle there. 

The Vallejo Police Department did not respond to questions from the Vallejo Sun about why officers did not respond when emergency services were waiting on them to clear the scene. Vallejo police officers never showed up to the location, but later arrested the driver after he drove away. 

According to a family member of the man who had passed out, a woman was able to wake him up by pounding on the windshield of the vehicle. 

The man then drove away from the scene on Meadows Drive heading to his home, which was only a few blocks away, according to the family member. 

The family member said that the man has narcolepsy and had been working long hours recently, compounding the effects of the disorder.

Just before the man reached his home a number of Police cruisers arrived and surrounded his vehicle. With their weapons drawn, officers ordered the man to step out of the vehicle, according to the family member. 

“They questioned him about a robbery,” said the family member, “but he said ‘No, I’m the guy that passed out on the road.’”

The officers arrested the man on a driving under the influence charge after the man declined a field sobriety test.

The man’s family member said that they submitted a complaint to the state Department of Justice for excessive force because the officers had slammed the man’s chest into the pavement even though he was complying with their orders. 

Vallejo police have struggled to promptly respond to 911 calls in recent years. Interim Police Chief Jason Ta has reported that the Vallejo Police Department’s staffing crisis has impacted emergency response times across the city. 

Last year, as the City Council considered whether to declare a state of emergency over short staffing in the Police Department, Ta said that the average response time for top priority calls — when a person is at immediate risk of physical harm or a property crime is in progress — was just over 11 minutes from the time a 911 call goes to dispatch to the time an officer arrives on scene, nearly twice what he said was an adequate response time, six minutes.

Yet in Friday’s incident and others, response times were far longer than that.

In another recent incident, two men broke into the tour vehicle of the U.K.-based band Sports Team when they stopped at the Starbucks on Magazine Street. When band members and the band’s manager came out of the Starbucks to confront the thieves, one of the men brandished a handgun to hold them off. The other man continued to loot the vehicle in front of a small crowd of onlookers who had gathered outside the Starbucks.

Bystanders called 911 during the incident but no officers showed up. The group said in an Instagram post that they called the Vallejo Police Department and were told to make a report online.

They wrote that it was “pretty shocking how resigned everyone seemed to be to it.”