It was a cool afternoon in early January and Brittany McElrathbey was lounging at her brother’s apartment in southwest Atlanta, scrolling on Instagram, when a stray bullet smashed through the window.

The bullet pierced the couch, hit Brittany in the back of the neck and exited through the bridge of her nose.

The AJC’s investigation found that the problem worsened in recent years, reaching a dire level in some communities as the pandemic depleted the workforce in 911 centers and positions went unfilled. This left thousands of callers across the metro area on hold while in crisis.

The AJC interviewed dozens of people who shared their stories of getting placed on hold when they called 911 for help. They described feelings of terror and disbelief, and a shattered trust of the emergency services system. The callers’ stories included a church usher put on hold after watching a parishioner collapse and become nonresponsive; a young woman attacked in a domestic violence dispute who called for help and got the automatic hold message from 911; a partygoer held on the emergency line after a fellow guest had a seizure.

The consequences of placing a 911 caller on hold can be dangerous, even deadly.

“We can help provide insight, information, and direct instruction on how to stop a bleed, give CPR, get somebody out of a burning building,” said Ty Wooten, a director at the International Academies of Emergency Dispatch of 911 centers, later adding: “Every single second counts.”

Missing the mark

Metro Atlanta is covered by a patchwork of 911 centers run by county and city governments. The AJC requested call data from more than two dozen local 911 centers and found a mix of successful response times combined with troubling delays.

The AJC measured every agency against the standard for 911 answer times, as set out by industry professionals: that 90% of calls are answered within 15 seconds, and 95% of calls are answered within 20 seconds.

Poor performing agencies included DeKalb County E-911, Gwinnett County E-911 and Atlanta E-911. Among the key findings:

♦ At DeKalb County E-911, just over half of calls in 2023 were answered within 20 seconds — the worst response time among the metro area agencies the AJC examined.

♦ At Atlanta E-911, which has the largest call volume in the metro region, 30% of calls in 2023 took longer than 20 seconds to answer and 1 of every 10 calls took longer than a minute to answer.

♦ At Gwinnett County E-911, 1 of every 3 calls took more than 20 seconds to answer last year and about one in five calls took longer than a minute to answer.

Among the more successful jurisdictions were the cities of Sandy Springs, Johns Creek, Dunwoody and Brookhaven, which contract out their 911 services to a private company, through a partnership called ChatComm. That partnership performs better than the industry standard. Additionally, the 911 centers in Clayton and Cobb counties and Roswell are answering calls at rates that met or performed better than the industry standard.

In the middle of the pack was the Fulton County E-911 center, which covers Fairburn, Union City, Palmetto, Chattahoochee Hills, South Fulton and unincorporated parts of the county. The center fell short of the industry standard in 2023: only about 84% of calls to Fulton 911 were answered within 20 seconds.

Megan Spence has more experience with 911 than most. The 39-year-old physical therapist cares for patients around metro Atlanta who’ve come home from the hospital, and sometimes they need to be rushed back because of a sudden health setback.

Since the pandemic, Spence says she has had to call 911 frequently, often more than once a month, and estimates she has been put on hold about a half-dozen times.

One of those calls turned into a full-blown crisis. Spence had entered the patient’s home to find her soaked in blood. The woman, recovering from knee surgery, had mistakenly continued to take blood thinner medication against a doctor’s instructions. When Spence dialed 911, she was placed on hold. The patient’s family members panicked, she said, and Spence felt helpless.

“In that situation, there’s nothing I can do,” Spence said. “I can’t make the bleeding stop.”

Eventually, Spence got through and an ambulance arrived. But the experience was harrowing, Spence said. The patient was in the intensive care unit for a month.

Fewer 911 operators, longer delays

From an early age, children learn that 911 is the number to call in an emergency, when every second counts. But, in recent years, emergency communications systems have been strained in communities across the country like never before.

Nationwide, the length of time callers waited for a 911 operator to pick up rose during the pandemic, as agencies struggled to retain staff who can handle the high-stress work that requires a calming voice during a crisis.

“It’s not a job that many people can do,” said April Heinze, chief of 911 operations at the National Emergency Number Association, later adding, “The folks that we do hire sometimes didn’t really realize what they were signing up for.”

The exodus of workers during the pandemic has resulted in fewer people who are trained to take emergency calls, leading to delays in answer times. This has strained 911 centers in many major metro areas, including Las Vegas; San Francisco; Austin, Texas; and Kansas City, Missouri.

The root of the problem, according to industry experts and agency leaders? Staffing.

There’s no easy fix to the 911 worker shortage. Some local agencies have raised wages. But even after new workers are hired, their training takes a long time.

There are the secondary problems, such as slow ambulance response times that can clog up the emergency system. And there are structural problems, such as aging technology that slows response times and physically aging buildings that can disrupt the entire 911 operation.

“Clearly, we were not where we wanted to be in 2023,” Peter Aman, chief administrative officer for the Atlanta Police Department, told the AJC. “The hold times in 2023 were not acceptable.”

‘Something out of the movies’

In Brittany McElrathbey’s case, more than one person at the southwest Atlanta apartment complex called 911 right after she was shot, but all were placed on hold. So the McElrathbey family realized they were on their own.

Her brother, Cornelius McElrathbey, carried his sister into their sedan, along with their mom, who held the phone as they listened to the 911 hold message that kept repeating the same message: to not hang up, that someone would be with them as soon as possible.

It was approaching rush hour in Atlanta, and traffic was already backed up on the highway. Cornelius drove on the city streets toward Grady Memorial Hospital like a mad man: running red lights, striking curbs and exceeding 60 mph.

“It was like something out of the movies,” he said. “I wasn’t really trying to break the law, but the law didn’t matter at the time. We tried to get the law on the phone.”

His sister’s condition worsened with each passing minute: Her eye became swollen, her airways started to close and pieces of pink internal tissue fell from her nose. Then, moments before the family arrived at the hospital, a 911 operator finally answered. They were told to pull over and wait for an ambulance. But that wasn’t an option, Cornelius thought. He kept driving.

Once at the hospital, he clutched Brittany in his arms, racing into the building as she fluttered in and out of consciousness. The hospital staff took her to begin treatment.

The last thing she remembers is her brother, standing there, before everything went black.

“I said, ‘Cornelius, don’t let me die,’” Brittany recalled of that moment.

Improving the system

In the AJC’s review of 21 metro area jurisdictions, some were more forthright than others.

Gwinnett County officials would not make anyone from the 911 center available for an interview, instead issuing a statement about its improved pay for 911 workers and how the issue of improving the emergency system is “a top priority for county leadership.”

Atlanta E-911 is the largest agency in the state, and it frequently handles complex calls such as shootings, major traffic accidents and apartment fires, Aman said. Those complex calls take longer to resolve, thus creating a backlog.

Atlanta’s center recently added nearly 70 new call takers, but training takes about six months. When those new hires come online, Aman predicted they will be able to answer 95% of calls within 20 seconds.

“We have the tools, technology, people, processes and systems in place to meet national standards consistently, as we move through this year,” Aman said.

On the other end of the spectrum is Cobb County.

Melissa Alterio, executive director for the Cobb County E-911 center, said county officials have slowed worker turnover by raising wages and improving the work environment. There’s a peer support program and licensed clinicians for mental well-being, and workers engage in friendly competitions to improve their metrics.

Those changes, Alterio said, contributed to the agency’s improved answer times. Back in 2021, Cobb County E-911 was falling short of the national standard — answering about 89% of calls within 20 seconds. Last year, the center met the national standard.

“We truly try to do everything that we can to motivate our staff members,” Alterio said.

Physical, mental healing of Brittany McElrathbey

It has been months since the shooting and, slowly, Brittany McElrathbey is healing. Her family is raising money to cover the costly hospital stay and subsequent surgeries. At the hospital, the family was told there had been other major shootings that day — a situation the APD says can clog the emergency phone system.

Her injuries included, a broken neck, jaw, eye socket and nose. She still can’t hear out of one ear and is unsure whether she will be able to again. Her right eye won’t close on its own; before going to sleep she has to shut it manually. She still spits out chunks of blood.

Beyond the physical pain, McElrathbey suffers a lot of emotional distress. During a recent storm, she heard a loud thunderclap. She jolted forward, on the verge of tears.

In March, Atlanta police arrested a man, 20-year-old Daniel Neal, in connection with the shooting.

The more the McElrathbey family thinks about that day, the angrier they become. Not only was the shooting random and reckless, but they believe that if they hadn’t turned their sedan into a makeshift emergency vehicle, Brittany would have died.

“She would have bled to death,” said Tonya, her mom.

The lesson they’ve taken from this experience? To learn basic first aid skills, such as CPR, and to think for yourself in an emergency.

“Be prepared for 911 not being there for you,” Tonya said.

Last fall, reporters at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution began hearing from people concerned about problems when they called 911. Many had been placed on hold during a crisis. Our reporters sought readers’ help through an online form published on AJC.com. We asked for your stories about your experience with 911. We followed up and heard from scores of people who said they’d been placed on hold while calling for help from emergency services. We also contacted people through social media and neighborhood organizations. All told, reporters heard from more than 150 people about their issues calling 911 in metro Atlanta.

Reporters requested data from local governments on emergency call answer times from more than 30 metro-area 911 centers. The twenty-one responsive agencies provided data representing millions of calls across Atlanta and the metro counties.

We compared the center’s answer times to the standard set by the National Emergency Number Association and the metric many agencies use as a performance indicator: that 95% of calls should be answered within 20 seconds.

The analysis found, time and again, that an alarmingly high number of callers were left waiting for longer than 20 seconds. While most calls were answered within seconds, our reporters found an alarming number of callers were placed on hold for minutes at a time. Some callers waited so long that they hung up in frustration and panicked before ever reaching an operator.