Attorneys for the family of Kyle Plush will announce a wrongful death lawsuit against the City of Cincinnati, former Cincinnati City Manager Harry Black, two emergency dispatchers and two Cincinnati Police officers over the 16-year-old’s death while trapped under the bench seat of a minivan after calling 911 twice.
Plush died April 10, 2018 in the parking lot of Seven Hills School after the rear seat of his Honda Odyssey flipped over and pinned him down. He is believed to have used a voice-command function to call 911 operators, the second of whom dispatched officers to the scene. Those officers, however, were unable to locate Plush. Body camera footage shows they did not leave their cruiser during the search.
Plush’s father found the boy six hours later, after the latter had died from suffocation.
Plush’s death caused a firestorm of controversy around long-running problems at the city’s Emergency Communications Center, where technology glitches and services outages had been reported for years. The incident also had political implications — it was a final factor in the ouster of former City Manager Harry Black last year.
In the aftermath of the tragedy, some of the lingering questions around Plush’s death included why two Cincinnati Police officers didn’t leave their police cruiser when responding to Plush’s call, the role of technological failures with the city’s computer-aided dispatch systems, why dispatchers didn’t pass along vital information about Plush’s situation and how much detail officers had about his location.
The city released its own report about the incident and has promised big investments in updated technology, call center staffing and training and other areas overseen by the ECC. But the Plush family and their attorneys — Al Gerhardstein and Jennifer Branch — say the point of their suit is to force the city to figure out exactly what went wrong.
“Our frustration is that as it stands, we can’t confirm that a tragedy like Kyle’s couldn’t happen again,” the family said in a statement today. “That’s unacceptable. We hired attorneys and experts who have started a more thorough investigation of what went wrong the day our son was taken from us. In order for the city to have credibility about their ECC action plan or any reforms, they need to be honest about what happened. They failed our son.”
The lawsuit is based on findings from former Harris County, Texas 911 Emergency Network CEO John Melcher, who investigated the incident and concluded that both dispatchers made several crucial errors in handling Plush’s call. The suit also includes findings from police practices expert Dr. Michael Lyman, who reviewed the actions of the two responding officers and suggests they made several critical errors as well.
“The City’s own reviews of the 9-1-1 failures did not reveal the mishandling of each of Kyle Plush’s calls for help,” a statement from Gerhardstein and Branch released today reads. “The goal of this lawsuit is to uncover the 9-1-1 problems that lead to Kyle’s death.”
This article appears in Aug 7-14, 2019.