bvelliquette@heraldsun.com; 918-1042
HILLSBOROUGH — In its lawsuit against Orange County and its director of Emergency Services, the Orange County Rescue Squad is hoping to add a 79-year-old woman, who waited 45 minutes for an ambulance after she broke her femur, as a plaintiff to its lawsuit.
The Rescue Squad, a volunteer agency located in Hillsborough that provided auxiliary emergency services to the professional Orange County Emergency Medical Services, also has filed a public records lawsuit against the University of North Carolina in an attempt to obtain records of emergency response times from a department that studies exactly that.
In April 2009, the Rescue Squad filed a lawsuit against Orange County and Col. F. Rojas Montes de Oca Jr., the director of Emergency Services. Montes de Oca put the Rescue Squad on stand down in July 2008 after he received reports of unprofessional behavior of the volunteers.
They included reports that the squad members used tools that caused sparks while standing in gasoline at an accident scene, that they engaged in various games and stunts at its headquarters, that family members, including children, roamed through the headquarters, and that once it left the scene of an incident without securing its doors to its vehicle, and its equipment fell out all over the road.
Since filing the original lawsuit, Orange County as well as the Rescue Squad have filed a number of motions in U.S. District Court.
Orange County and Montes de Oca have filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit, and that has not yet been heard.
The Rescue Squad has filed a motion to add a woman named Frances D. Brown as a plaintiff. On Aug. 23, 2008, Brown, 79, her husband and other family members ate Sunday dinner at the Mayflower Restaurant in Hillsborough, according to the motion.
As she was leaving the restaurant, she tripped and fell, breaking her femur. The Rescue Squad is located just up the road from the Mayflower, approximately one-quarter mile away, but it was not dispatched to the scene because of the stand down order.
The lawsuit claims it took 30 minutes before anyone arrived to help her after her family called 911 for help. It then took another 15 minutes before the ambulance arrived to take her to the hospital in Durham.
“Mrs. Brown arrived at the hospital approximately one hour after her fall,” the lawsuit claims.
A court date to hear those motions in federal court has not yet been set, said Jeremy Browner, the attorney representing the Rescue Squad. It’s likely that if a judge does not grant Orange County’s motion to dismiss the case, the judge would also make a decision about whether the case can go forward as a class action suit and whether Brown can be added as a plaintiff, Browner said.
In an attempt to prove its contention that emergency response times are too slow in Orange County because of the lack of ambulances and paramedics, the Rescue Squad has filed a lawsuit in Orange County Civil Superior Court against the University of North Carolina asking for records about EMS response times in Orange County.
Browner wrote a letter asking for the response times in Orange County, but in a return e-mail from Associate Vice Chancellor David Parker, Parker declined to send Browner the records, saying there is information in the records that could identify patients.
The Rescue Squad, in turn, filed a lawsuit claiming the information is public record, and any identifying patient information could be stripped from the data.
A hearing on the issue is scheduled for Sept. 28.
