ST. LOUIS — A spate of severe storms swept through St. Louis over the weekend, killing a 33-year-old woman and a 5-year-old boy.
A massive tree toppled and crushed a house in Jennings. Robert 'RJ' Lawrence III was pinned and killed inside his bedroom on Saturday afternoon.
Officials identified the woman killed in the Grove neighborhood during Saturday's storms as 33-year-old Katherine Coen. She died when a tree fell on her car.
A nearby business owner said one of her employees tried to save the woman when calls to 911 went unanswered for about 30 minutes.
"They tried calling 911 repeatedly for over 30 minutes," Helen Petty told 5 On Your Side on Saturday. "Finally another neighbor came out who knows a county firefighter and called him to have him call somebody in the city to try to get somebody to get through just to let them know that this woman was trapped in her car."
5 On Your Side pressed public officials for answers on Monday to learn more about what took so long to respond to that scene on Saturday.
The city of St. Louis has not yet released a clear timeline to answer critics who raised concerns about long delays. The response time to that incident remains under investigation, according to aides in Mayor Tishaura Jones' office.
The Department of Public Safety said first responders were flooded with emergency calls during the severe storms. At the peak of call volume, dispatchers received more than a thousand calls in a two-hour span, or roughly one call every seven seconds.
Advocates for "Transforming 911" at the nonprofit group 'Forward Through Ferguson' say that's a lot of work for dispatchers who are overworked, underpaid, and understaffed.
"They are incredibly understaffed," Jia Lien Yang said. "You might have two dispatchers working at a particular time for a shift."
City budget documents show St. Louis budgeted enough money to employ 117 emergency dispatchers between police, fire and EMS, but with only 72 dispatchers currently on the job, just 62% of those jobs are filled.
"We know that they're frustrated," Yang said. "They're very stressed, and that does contribute to the high rates of PTSD that they have -- higher than the general public and even higher than for police officers, because they have to make these incredibly stressful decisions."
Forward Through Ferguson has called for the city to combine the dispatching call centers for police, fire, EMS, and social and mental health services all into one facility to streamline their efforts.
In a recently released report, the nonprofit group outlined proposals to build out and fully integrate 911 and 988 call centers to enhance response time to mental health or public safety emergencies.
Mayor Jones, whose agenda includes similar goals, said in a March interview that the results haven't necessarily arrived yet.
"We're working to combine our 911 operators all into one facility," she said when she was asked if the city's 911 response time was improving.
Pressed further, she acknowledged that the response time hadn't improved.
"Not yet, but we've been working really hard on it," Jones said.
According to recent reporting from 5 On Your Side's I-Team, the city fell further below the national standards in 2023 than the year prior.
The mayor's plans to construct a consolidated Public Safety Access Point to combine all of the city's dispatchers are still a long way from becoming reality. The planning phase, which began in 2008, is still stuck in 'Phase 1,' according to a document provided by the Department of Public Safety.
Consultants are approximately 75% finished studying the feasibility of the project. The city hopes to start collecting construction bids towards the end of this year and break ground in mid-2024. The site wouldn't be completed until the fall of 2026, if the $42 million project remains on schedule.
In St. Louis County, emergency responders arrived at the scene where a tree fell on the 5-year-old boy within two minutes of receiving the first phone call, according to law enforcement records and phone logs reviewed by 5 On Your Side.
The boy's mother and a family friend who lives nearby both placed separate calls to 911 and the St. Louis County Police Department. The only outgoing calls to law enforcement were made mere minutes before the police arrived on scene, according to their cell phone records.
A nearby neighbor showed us her first call to 911 was placed at 3:52 p.m. A copy of the outgoing calls from the boy's mother show she called the St. Louis County Police Department at 3:56 p.m.
"According to our call records, we received the call at 3:53 PM, were dispatched also at 3:53 PM and officers began arriving at 3:53 through 3:55 PM," Sergeant Tracy Panus with the St. Louis County Police Department said.
"This is a horrible, tragic situation that is tough for everyone involved to process, including our first responders," Panus said. "Our response times were quick and our officers did everything they could to aid this boy."
Jennings Councilwoman Nadia Quinn launched a GoFundMe page to raise money for the boy's family. A blog post on the page claims that first responders didn't arrive for 45 minutes.
It's unclear if initial calls were routed to the St. Louis 911 call center given the proximity of Jennings to the city's border.