Crenshanda Williams was arrested and charged after hanging up on thousands of emergency calls. Her supervisors had noticed that her calls don’t last more than 20 seconds and found it strange so she had been under police investigation for some time. A review of the Houston Emergency Center database found that “thousands of short calls have been attributed to the defendant” from October 2015 to March 2016. Interfering with an emergency call is a misdemeanor, which is what Williams has been charged with.
When asked, she told the Houston Police that she ignored the calls because she did not want to talk to anybody at the time. Police revealed two cases of the many cases Williams turned away one of which ended in someone’s death. A robbery took place in a store in which a man named Hua Li had just walked in to purchase lotto tickets. He heard several gunshots and called the police from his car but got cut off in the middle of his sentence when he told Williams he was in a robbery. He called 911 a total of three times until his last call got answered by a different dispatcher. By then, the store manager had died.
Another call that Williams ignored was from a driver on a highway that was reporting two trucks racing on a highway. Jim Moten Jr. called 911 and began to tell her, “I’m driving 45 South right now and right now, I am at …” when she hung up on him. Right after hanging up, Williams was heard on a recording saying that she doesn’t have time for these calls. Moten called a second time and ended up with a different dispatcher who helped him.
The 43-year-old dispatcher is scheduled to appear in court next week.
