Kansas City wrongful death settlement creates landmark new 911 policy

Kansas City’s 911 call delay resulted in a record $4,125,000 settlement in September following four years of litigation and led to policy changes. It also cost two young children their mother.

Cathryn McClelland was getting her children ready for daycare on July 18, 2019, when she collapsed. Her 8-year-old son Joel immediately called 911 as his parents — a nurse and a police officer — taught him.

A delay on the part of 911 call-takers led to McClelland’s death, said Brian McCallister, of the McCallister Law Firm, who handled the wrongful death lawsuit.

The McClellands lived in Prairie Village, Kansas and when Joel dialed 911, the call pinged a cell tower in Kansas City, Missouri.

For 13 minutes after Joel called 911, no help was dispatched, according to McCallister.

“Despite knowing the call needed to be transferred to the appropriate agency in Kansas, the call-taker inexplicably called the Kansas City, Missouri Fire Department, where that agency’s call-taker would add to the delay,” he said in a release following the settlement. “They both had the exact address of the emergency in Kansas. Neither of them could even send help because they were in Missouri and the medical emergency was in Kansas and both call-takers knew that. Yet precious minutes rolled by with no ambulance on its way to Joel’s house.”

Overall, it took approximately 20 minutes for help to arrive, and though emergency responders were able to restart McClelland’s heart after the cardiac arrest, she was brain-dead due to the length of time she went without oxygen.

It is notoriously difficult to obtain a large settlement in a 911 call case because the qualified immunity for call takers is so strong. McCallister took 42 depositions to overcome this barrier and prove gross negligence. There is no guidance in Missouri as to what constitutes gross negligence and there are no templates for the proper jury instructions to use, he said. So, they created their own.

“We started building our evidence very, very early, [with the] very first deposition we took and we built questions that were specifically designed to get at that gross negligence,” McCallister said. “We knew from the training materials that we got that what should have happened with this call is that it should have been transferred to the appropriate agency immediately. And that word immediately is important.”

As a result, McCallister operated on the assumption that the initial call takers had been trained to transfer this call.

“We developed a series of questions that I call ‘agree disagree boards,’ where we very plainly set out in very clear English, a relatively narrowly tailored statement that they either have to agree with or disagree with and either way whether they agree or disagree, it’s helpful to us,” McCallister said. “So for instance, we had an agree disagree board that said: ‘On July 18, 2019, you knew that your reaction to a call could mean the difference between life or death to the caller.’ And of course, they have to agree with that. Well, if they knew that, then why did they take 13 minutes before they even thought about sending an ambulance? That is gross negligence.”