FLORIDA 911 DISPATCHER LOGGED SHOOTING AS SUAPICIOUS INCIDENT WHILE SUPERVISOR WAS WATCHING NETFLIX

911 supervisor playing Netflix movie didn’t flag call as a shooting

By Lisa J. Huriash

South Florida Sun Sentinel
November 4, 2019

A Coral Springs police dispatch supervisor was at work playing a Netflix movie when she didn’t catch an incorrectly logged 911 call.

A woman phoned 911 to report someone had just shot at her car, piercing her back window, hitting her front windshield and almost shooting her in the head. But there was a half-hour delay in the call being dispatched to an officer.

Julie Vidaud was the shift supervisor minutes before 7 p.m. on a June evening.

The woman who phoned 911 said during the shooting, a hot metal piece landed in her lap, which later turned out to be a bullet. The 911 dispatcher assured the woman that help was on the way.

But the woman, Guadalupe Herrera, called back about 16 minutes later “very upset and concerned that they may shoot again,” according to police records.

Herrera called 911 again four minutes later, saying she was going to drive herself to the police station. Herrera recalled Monday how she was devastated that she called for help and nobody came.

“It was a very hard situation,” she told the South Florida Sun Sentinel. “It was a drive-by shooting. My windshield was shattered. Nobody showed up — I had to drive myself to the agency.”

By 7:30 p.m., Herrera’s sister called to complain nobody ever came out to help.

Investigators later realized the call had been logged by dispatchers as a “suspicious incident” when it should have gotten a priority “shooting.” About 34 minutes went by between when Herrera first called 911 and when it was dispatched to officers.

But investigators wanted to know how the error happened and why the boss of the two call-takers had missed it.

They pulled data from Vidaud’s computer over 30 days to find the most-used applications were Netflix, Hulu and Xfinity TV. They found that the movie “I Am Mother,” with actress Hilary Swank, played at her workstation for almost two hours while the 911 caller was reporting the shooting.

On June 9, the day of the shooting, Vidaud’s computer also showed use of “numerous site clicks for websites related to shopping, news stories, streaming TV, movies, vacation planning, and fewer that could be considered work related,” according to an internal affairs investigation report released Monday.

Vidaud told an investigator that movies play in the background but that doesn’t mean she was watching a flick for two hours. She said the supervisor’s console has five monitors. She said “there was a good chance that Netflix was running but that she would not have been watching during that period of time,” according to the report.

The investigator, Sgt. Dave Kirkland, told her this call was handled so badly he would describe it as a “catastrophic failure,” according to records.

Kirkland, who oversees internal investigations, wrote in his report that "the evidence conclusively shows that Vidaud spends an inordinate amount of time conducting personal business” on her police work computer, including movies and streaming TV.

Kirkland said the original 911 call-taker was fired. The second person who handled the call, a dispatcher, “was disciplined and has since been terminated,” police said.

Vidaud, who is not represented by the police union, couldn’t be reached for comment Monday.

Vidaud, whose discipline is pending, is expected to receive a two-day suspension without pay, police said. The investigation’s findings were inconclusive on what Vidaud was doing at the specific time of the incident, “however based on the investigation she will be facing discipline for ‘Failure to Supervise,'” police said.

Vidaud promised she no longer would have Netflix playing at work, the report said. But that’s going to be the case from now on for all dispatchers: The agency policy was changed to prohibit any streaming of media services during their shifts, police said.

Herrera said she was pleased that the agency was considering a suspension for the supervisor. “It definitely helps.”

Kirkland said the suspect in the shooting has charged with premeditated attempted murder.

According to the arrest affidavit, the woman was in her red Volkswagen leaving a gas station when Kyriakos Manolas, 33, of Coconut Creek, allegedly shot out her rear windshield. The bullet traveled through the head rest and steering wheel, hit the front windshield and then landed in her lap.

Surveillance video from several businesses linked Manolas, who was driving his father’s Mitsubishi, to the shooting, according to the affidavit.