A retired cop who found the body of a woman in the backyard of her home after she’d been dead for two days said he called Austin police five times before getting a response.
The unsettling details were described in a letter sent by retired Austin police officer Robert A. Gross to the office of Mayor Kirk Watson and shared on Twitter by fellow retired officer Dennis Farris.
Gross, who served with the Austin Police Department (APD) between 1975 and 2002, had been checking on the elderly couple from time to time, according to Farris.
In his letter, Gross said he attempted to contact 911 on June 18 concerning a deceased person “four or five times” before sending his wife to the nearest fire station to respond and have them contact APD.
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Per state law, police are required to respond any time a death is reported. Deaths – even those unintended – are regarded as suspicious until police give the OK for the bodies to be released to medical examiners.
Fire crews and EMS responded within minutes as Gross was still waiting for 911 to answer.
“I finally got a response after seventeen minutes and twenty-two seconds with public safety already on scene,” Gross said in his letter.
Gross had gone to check on the elderly couple and found the wife dead in the backyard and the husband sitting on a couch in the living room “staring at a blank wall,” with no support. The husband had had a recent hospitalization and head surgery and “could have been a second victim.”
An Austin police cruiser. A retired officer said he was unable to get ahold of 911 for seventeen minutes and twenty-two seconds when he was trying to reach them about a woman he had found dead. (Austin Police Department)
“AFD and EMS were shocked but not surprised that 9-1-1 had not answered even when they were on hand and still waiting for a response,” Gross said. “The City of Austin has failed to maintain one of its primary responsibilities to provide adequate Public Safety Response (APD/AFD/EMS) to the citizens that elected them.”
Fox News Digital contacted the Austin Police Department and the Mayor’s Office for comment but received no response.
The department has fewer sworn officers than it did 15 years ago, despite a boom in population in the Texas state capital over the past two decades.
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Struggles to hire new talent and hold onto existing officers stretch back several years and became most acute in August 2020, when Austin’s City Council voted to cut the police budget by almost a third to “re-imagine” public safety.
Staffing shortages have impacted 911 call centers. In April, it was reported that sergeants were filling in as 911 call takers to ensure that emergencies could be tended to in a timely manner.
“The big picture on this shows that you have people who don’t want to come work for Austin. They don’t want to come work at Austin’s 9-1-1 center and be a police dispatcher or they don’t want to work for APD because of the feeling and the perception that the political leaders in this city don’t support them,” Farris told Fox News Digital.
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APD partnered with the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) in March after the city’s policies resulted in increased crime. The partnership was paused in May before resuming last month.
Fox News’ Greg Wehner contributed to this report.
