One of the many personnel in the communications room for 911 operators at the Metro Police dispatch center on Friday, April, 10, 2015.
Wednesday, Aug. 2, 2023 | 2 a.m.
Beverly Ma’s sister waited 19 minutes for Metro Police to arrive as George Bone, her sister’s roommate, calmly admitted to living with Ma’s body in a bedroom closet for more than two months.
She waited on hold for more than four minutes before she was connected to a dispatcher, even after briefly explaining the seriousness of the situation.
While on hold, the 911 audio continues.
In the recording, the sister is heard questioning the 31-year-old Bone, who was later charged with Ma’s murder. She asks why he didn’t call police. She asks how he can brush his teeth as he talks about her sister’s body.
Dispatchers eventually connect to the call and Bone himself tells them that Ma’s body has been in the closet for more than two months.
During the call, the voice of Ma’s sister seems to display a range of emotions from anger at Bone, to confusion, anxiety and sadness.
Ma’s mother, who is also at the home, makes another 911 call as the minutes tick by. She expresses concern Bone will run before police arrive. She repeatedly tells everyone in the house not to touch anything.
The sister’s girlfriend makes a third call to 911 as she takes a Lyft to get to the house. She explains numerous times her concern for the sister and mother’s safety.
Overall, it took 17 minutes from the time the 911 audio starts for an ambulance to arrive and 19 minutes for police to arrive in response to the call last week.
DISPATCH SHORT STAFFED
The National Emergency Number Association, which sets national standards for 911 centers, asks that 90% of calls be answered within 15 seconds and 95% within 20 seconds.
From April 2022 through February, Metro Police met its standard of answering 90% of its 1.1 million emergency calls within 10 seconds. But it missed the standard in December at 85% and in February at 76%, according to data previously reported by the Sun.
In the data examined by the Sun, the average maximum wait time over the same period shot up to 2 minutes, 47 seconds. In December 2022, the average maximum wait time spiked to 3 minutes. The maximum wait got even longer in February, up to 4 minutes, 22 seconds.
Metro officials have said the growing wait times are due to staffing shortages — an issue they’ve been working to fix in recent months.
ANOTHER RECENT CASE
On June 27, about a month before Ma’s body was discovered, police found three bodies in an apartment in a separate unrelated case. Again, 911 audio shows long response times in the case.
A coworker of Dina Vail, a respected Las Vegas dance instructor, attempted to call 911 and 311 for a welfare check after the teacher didn’t show up to work, according to an 8 News report.
The coworker told a 911 dispatcher they’d waited for more than an hour on another 311 call that was never answered, News 8 reported. The dispatcher said it should only be a 20 minute wait time.
The coworker then asked the apartment complex, located on Flamingo, for a welfare check, a police report show.
As two maintenance workers entered the apartment they were attacked by Spencer McDonald, Vail’s grandson.
Soon after, a worker at the apartment complex makes another 911 call. She tells the dispatcher about the welfare check for Vail and that a maintenance man is missing inside the apartment. She also says another maintenance worker was attacked and bleeding in the office.
A dispatcher seems to have trouble unscrambling all the information, confused about who is bleeding and who is still in the apartment. The employee begs for help as she sees McDonald leave the apartment with a metal pole weapon.
The employee and others rush to lock the office doors.
“You guys are taking too long,” the employee tells the dispatcher.
Seven minutes into the call, the maintenance worker yells in the background that he needs an ambulance, expressing a need for urgency.
Police arrive more than nine minutes after the 911 phone call starts.
They would find the body of Christopher Brassard, the missing maintenance worker, Vail and her boyfriend, Andrew Graden, inside the apartment. McDonald would tell police he’d lived with the bodies of Vail and Graden in the apartment for several days.
McDonald has since been charged in the deaths.
METRO RECRUITING
Metro Police also agrees its 911 times are taking too long, but they hope recent recruiting efforts will improve that.
In April, Metro had 69 vacancies among the 245 positions on its communications desk, a 28% shortfall. The desk includes 911 and nonemergency 311 call-takers and dispatchers.
Thirty-five communications professionals graduated from the academy July 26, 66 people are currently in training for and 50 new recruits will begin training Sept. 8, according to Deputy Chief Mike Gennaro.
“We will be very close to being fully staffed,” Gennaro said. “We just have to get them through training and all will be on the floor and answering phones. We’ve been heavily recruiting.”
Gennaro previously outlined ways the department is streamlining hiring practices and adjusting hiring standards to bring recruits in faster during a time when departments are facing shortages nationally.
MA’S LAST CALL WAS TO 911
Last week was not the first time police had responded to a 911 call at the house located on the 5300 block of Railroad River Ave.
The last outgoing call from Beverly Ma’s phone was to 911 on May 4, according to a police report. The audio recording, described in a report, contains a shouting fight between a male and a female. The report says the call ends with a female saying, “Why?”
Many of Ma’s and Bone’s fights are about Bone having a previous criminal record, he told police. When arrested for Ma’s homicide, Bone also was charged with a failure to register as a sex offender.
Ma never responds to the dispatcher’s questions before the call ends, the report says. Dispatchers attempted to return the call in May, but attempts went unanswered.
Officers were dispatched to the house. They knocked. No one answered. They left.
Ma’s phone recorded 84 unanswered calls between the 911 call and when she was found on July 26.
Bone told police he found Ma in the closet on a date that has a five in it. Maybe May 5 or May 15, he said.
He said she had a fabric belt tied around her neck that he removed. He also said her body wasn’t suspended.
In Ma’s sister’s 911 call, Bone tells dispatchers he didn’t call police because he didn’t want to go to jail sooner than he had to.
He can be heard brushing his teeth as he calmly describes the body he found in the call.
The police report states Bone used Ma’s financial accounts to buy services and 171 items from Amazon during a period which police suspect was after Ma’s death.
Bone also said he lowered the thermostat as a way to combat the ever-growing fly population.
THE AIR CONDITIONER
Ma’s mother was out of the country in the months prior to finding Ma’s body. Her sister also lives in another state, according to info they gave 911 dispatchers. Both seemed to think it was odd they hadn’t heard from Ma in a couple months aside from texts.
They later learned the texts were coming from Bone posing as Ma.
It was eventually the high electric bill that led the family to finding Ma.
Ma’s mother had returned to Las Vegas, and as the owner of the house Ma and Bone was living in, she noticed the unusually high bill. She couldn’t reach Ma on the phone but went ahead and made an appointment for a repair man to check it out, a police report states.
The repairman man met the mother at the house. She couldn’t find Ma, even with George saying she was upstairs. It wasn’t until Ma’s sister arrived that George admitted that Ma was dead.
The sister tried to look in the closet but ultimately found the idea of seeing her sister’s body to be too troubling before she could find it.
She called 911 for help.
