A Maryland 911 operator told a frantic teenage girl to "stop whining" as the girl called Sunday to report that her father was the victim of a hit-and-run.
The 13-year-old girl was in the back seat of a car with her younger brother while her father and his fiancee were outside the car changing a flat tire on Sunday night.
A car slammed into the couple, killing Rick Warrick, 38, of Washington, D.C., and severely injuring Julia Pearce, 28. The girl immediately called 911, and while she was able to answer some questions, she was upset and couldn’t remain calm.
In a recording of the call, the operator interrupts the girl and says, "OK, let’s stop whining. Let’s stop whining, it’s hard to understand you."
The dispatcher didn’t ask the girl’s age and called her “ma’am.”
NBC 4 reported that the girl asked the 911 operator if they could hurry up, and the dispatcher said, “Ma’am, stop yelling. I need a location.”
“I think, to some degree, it was a poor choice of words,” Capt. Russ Davies, with the Anne Arundel Fire Department, told NBC. “However, what he was attempting to do was to get her attention to try to be able to start ascertaining information from her. It was pretty clear at that point that they didn’t know where they were.”
The accident location was determined through the 911 system, NBC said.
Police are still looking for information about the car that hit Warrick and Pearce.
"It's hard on me, and I think the right thing will be to do just to turn yourself in. Accidents happen and we understand," Scharmaine Ferrell-Anthony, Warrick’s mother, told NBC. "It was a tragic accident."
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