The neighbor said emergency responders worked quickly – but they did not seem panicked.
“In a situation where perhaps time is of the essence, there seems to be a little bit more urgency, but there was no urgency here,” the neighbor told CNN.
When the emergency vehicles left the street, the neighbor said their sirens were not on.
I work in 911 dispatch, different areas and agencies may handle things a little differently but where I work we give our incidents a priority from 1-5, with 1 being the highest
For EMS, priority 1 is things like cardiac arrests, shootings, stuff where the person has a very real chance of dying any second.
2 is most of the things you’d expect people to call an ambulance for, they do need to be seen in a hospital for and relatively quickly, but you’re not immediately in danger of expiring.
3 is the stuff that you probably could have called around to a couple friends for a ride or called an Uber or something for or maybe driven yourself to urgent care. Like sure, you probably want to see a doctor about that, but it’s not really that urgent, if you waited until tomorrow you’d probably be no worse off than you are today and in some cases you probably could have slept it off.
4 is basically for psych issues. You’re basically completely physically healthy and stable, you’re just cuckoo for coco puffs. The only way you’re going to die on the ambulance ride over is if it gets T-boned by a semi truck, or you annoy the crew so much that they throw you out the back of the ambulance while doing 70mph down the highway.
Which brings us to class 5. You’re dead. You’re obviously dead and no amount of life-saving measures are going to bring you back. Usually they’re not even going to actually take you away in an ambulance, they’re just going to say someone with medical training can go “yep, that’s a corpse” in case the cops on-scene are even dumber than usual and didn’t see you breathing, they’re going to throw a white sheet over you and let the coroner come around later to scrape you up. Unless you’re Mitch McConnell apparently.
What if his death was to be kept secret? Do VIPs get any priority? I would think in the situation being implied, they wouldn’t follow standard procedure. It’s all just conjecture… but these people are so vile and lie so freely that it is the first thing a lot of people including myself think of.
As far as VIPs getting priority, the only thing that comes to my mind that I’ve come across is one old rich guy with a note attached to his address with instructions that for basically any medical calls there can be directly airlifted to one of the big hospitals downtown
He’s loaded, lives almost right across from a small airport that one of our medevac helicopters fly out of, and made his fortune in some sort of healthcare/health insurance something-or-other (I’m fuzzy on the details of, but he was one of the big players in that field probably 30-40 years ago)
We have a handful of other pretty rich and influential people in my area, and I’ve gotten calls from and regarding a couple of them (nothing too crazy) but at least from my end of things there’s not a whole lot of special treatment going on. What special instructions the cops and other field units have isnt something I’m privy to.
“Oops, he fell out of the chopper. There was nothing we could do.”
I’d imagine it’s more about physical access. Bitch McConnell likely had multiple handlers and staff present. Hell maybe even a doctor. For a medical call like that I’m imagining emergency personnel come in a little differently than if it was a from a gun fight. Staff could shield the scene from any journalists or the such and try to control the situation a bit.
So McConnell would be what, somewhere between 11 and 30?
Would either a code 3 or 5 match the eyewitness description? Anything that might be unique as far as how the ambulance would leave the scene between those two codes?
I luckily haven’t been on-scene with a lot of EMS calls, I work from a bunker that’s usually miles away from where the action is taking place, so take thoughts on this for what they’re worth, I’m a bit outside of my area of expertise, and I don’t have a lot of details to go on so I don’t really want to speculate here, but I’ll leave some thoughts.
Also, just to reiterate, the class 1,2,3,4,5 terminology is what my agency uses, things can vary a lot from one place to another, and I certainly can’t speak for the policies and training and such that are in place anywhere else.
But an unconscious person is basically always going class 1 or 2 unless they were already a vegetable and it’s normal for them to be unconscious, but honestly even then it would probably be class 2 unless they really just need an ambulance to move them from point a to b and there’s not actually any other medical issues going on. They’re going to be going with some sense of urgency and leaving with lights and sirens.
If he was, in fact in cardiac arrest that is absolutely class 1 material. They’d be doing CPR on him or shocking him with a defibrillator as they’re going, he’d probably be intubated and they’d be ventilating him with a bag, I assume EMS in whatever town he lives in probably have some pretty good equipment so they’d probably have a LUCAS device to do chest compressions for them, etc.
I was actually on-scene with a cardiac arrest after a motorcycle accident once, helped perform CPR on someone until the ambulance arrived. I don’t think EMS was on-scene for 5 minutes before they were speeding off with the guy with lights and sirens going and a LUCAS strapped to his chest. I never looked up the call, but I would bet good money that that guy didn’t make it, but it was still fresh enough that there was a tiny chance and so he went class 1.
Hypothetically if they were able to restore a normal pulse with a defibrillator or whatever else they might have in their bag of tricks these days, it might go class 2, but that would still be high priority.
I can’t imagine any situation where they’re taking a patient who is unconscious and normally isn’t any less than a class 2 unless they’re dead.
From the short clip, and based off of the descriptions, it’s hard for me to say much. They’re certainly not running with the stretcher, but that could just be them being calm and professional, you don’t really want to be jolting the patient around after all, and they’re not exactly pussy-footing around, but still I don’t know if I’m seeing the kind of urgency I’d expect. If they did in fact leave without sirens, that’s really not jiving with the class 1 or 2 I’d expect for an unconscious patient, that sounds like 3, 4, or 5. It could be that they turned them on once they left the neighborhood, that’s not unheard of to avoid disturbing neighbors and causing a scene if there’s no traffic in the neighborhood for them to have to get through.