Half-a-dozen Rochester 911 Center employees have been placed on administrative leave after they failed to follow procedure in the case of Trevyan Rowe, the autistic City School District student who drowned last week in the Genesee River.
Trevyan walked away from school Thursday morning. About half-an-hour later, drivers began calling 911 to report a young man walking on the Douglass-Anthony Bridge over the Genesee River. Mayor Lovely Warren says both the 911 Center Director and Police Chief Michael Ciminelli have reviewed those tapes and found a critical error was made.
Chief Ciminelli says policy is to call out fire and rescue crews and the Rochester Police SCUBA team whenever someone is in trouble near the water. That didn’t happen in this case. Rochester Fire Department officials said their boats could have been at the I-490 bridge in three minutes if they’d been alerted. As it was, 911 Director Steve Cusenz says the trooper dispatched to the bridge saw nothing and dispatchers didn’t tell him some drivers were reporting seeing a person on the wrong side of the bridge railing.
The mayor says city employees failed the 14-year-old student, and the city has to own that.
In addition to putting those dispatchers on leave, Cusenz says the 911 Center has already revised its training and a number of the dispatchers have already taken the revised training module.