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Four first responders have been suspended after a woman they declared to be dead from a suspected overdose was actually alive.
Springfield Township Fire Chief Barry Cousino, Assistant Fire Chief David Moore along with two paramedics, Aiden Yoon and Bill Fordyce, have been placed on administrative leave.
The decision came after multiple first responders from Springfield Township and Toledo wrongly pronounced a woman dead inside an Ohio home, saying ‘alrighty, good enough for me’ as they made the call at the scene.
They then phoned a coroner, who arrived at the scene and found the woman breathing.
Arielle Diaz, 31, was found by paramedics ‘lying unresponsive on the couch’ with a ‘blue/grayish’ skin color on January 2 when they decided she was dead.
Four first responders have been suspended after a woman they declared to be dead from a suspected overdose was actually alive
Springfield Township Fire Chief Barry Cousino (left) and Assistant Fire Chief David Moore (right) were placed on administrative leave
Two paramedics, Aiden Yoon (left) and Bill Fordyce (right), have also been placed on administrative leave
The emergency response came after a neighbor called 911 when he heard a dog repeatedly barking and went to check on the property – only to find the woman unconscious.
EMS crews were already on the scene, but enlisted the help of the dog warden to remove the animal.
A ‘large aggressive pit-bull dog’ was reportedly at the woman’s side ‘unwilling to move,’ which complicated the first responder’s efforts to attend to her, they claimed.
While the police worked to get the dog out of the bed using food and other tactics, nobody had checked on the woman.
From a distance, the first responders noted that Diaz’s fingers and the area around her mouth were blue.
After the dog warden finally coerced the dog out of the property, EMS went back into the home and came to their decision on the woman just two minutes after the dog’s departure, citing ‘code 18’ – police slang for finding someone deceased.
After gathering outside to discuss Diaz’s state, the paramedic declared ‘she’s dependent lividity’ to the doctor on the phone.
The doctor responded ‘do you guys see any kind of lividity,’ to which they responded ‘no rigor is noted but dependent lividity.’
The coroner arrived at 9:45am, over an hour after Diaz was pronounced dead. At 9:57 am, the coroner noticed she let out a breath, that her abdomen felt warm and that her legs and feet were flexible.
Diaz was given a mask to help her breath and she received three doses of Narcan – after which she ‘perked up’.
The decision came after multiple first responders from Springfield Township and Toledo wrongly pronounced a woman dead inside an Ohio home, saying ‘alrighty, good enough for me’ as they made the call at the scene
Arielle Diaz, 31, was found by paramedics ‘lying unresponsive on the couch’ with a ‘blue/grayish’ skin color on January 2 when they decided she was dead
Springfield Township is promising an internal investigation into the response and said ‘it should not have happened’
Springfield Township is promising an internal investigation into the response and said ‘it should not have happened.’
‘The situation is tragic. It shouldn’t have happened, and we’re very sorry that it did,’ township administrator Michael Hampton said, according to WTOL. ‘Our internal investigation will certainly get to the bottom of what happened, and we’ll provide the public with as much transparency as we legally can.’
Barry Cousino and David Moore were not on the scene when the incident happened, they are being evaluated for how they handled the situation in the following days and their obligation to report the occurrence to township employees.
The township’s board of trustees first learned about the incident on Monday.
