A Texas man who found a deceased woman in her backyard claims it took several phone calls for Austin police to respond.
Retired Austin policeman Robert A. Gross’s letter to Mayor Kirk Watson regarding the woman who had been dead for two days was shared online by another retired officer identified as Dennis Farris, Fox News reported Monday.
Gross often checked on the elderly couple who lived at the home and said he tried to call 911 on June 18 approximately four or five times when he noticed the wife was dead in the backyard and the husband was inside the home sitting on the couch staring at a wall. The man had recently undergone head surgery, Gross noted in his letter.
“As I was unable to get a response, I had my wife drive to the nearest fire station #31 to respond and to have them contact APD [Austin Police Department] to respond to a deceased person. There was a response within minutes,” Gross wrote in the letter:
I got a copy of a email that was sent to the Mayor of Austin by one of the members of the APROA. This is unacceptable and there needs to be a solution now not months from now. If that means having the city and the county 9-1-1 operators being combined back into one unit or having… pic.twitter.com/t7MjY7kbdr
— Dennis Farris (@Farris_Actual) June 29, 2023
Under state law, police officers are required to respond whenever someone reports a death. All such instances are treated as suspicious until authorities permit bodies to be handed over to the medical examiners.
Gross said the Austin Fire Department (AFD) was on the scene followed by EMS crews, but he was still on the phone waiting for a response from 911. He finally got a response after 17 minutes.
“The City of Austin has failed to maintain one of its primary responsibilities to provide adequate Public Safety Response (APD/AFD/EMS) to the citizens that elected them,” he concluded.
In July 2022, Breitbart News reported the Texas capital city had been struggling due to a police officer shortage which resulted in longer response times for 911 calls:
The staffing issue stems from decisions made by the Austin City Council which cut millions from the police budget and diverted other supplemental funds into other non-police programs as part of the Defund the Police movement, Fox News reported in 2021. This resulted in the city’s first shortages of officers.
Per the recent Fox article, the Austin Police Department now employs fewer officers than it did 15 years ago.
In May 2021, Gov. Greg Abbott (R-TX) said he would sign a bill barring cities from defunding their police departments.
“The announcement follows a case where the response to a shooting in Austin took more than 16 minutes despite a man being critically wounded at the scene,” Breitbart News reported at the time.
Meanwhile, current and former Austin officers have cited hostility toward them and conservatives as the reason behind the officer shortage, according to a report from March.
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