Drowning woman scolded by emergency dispatcher: ‘This will teach you next time, don’t drive in the water’

‘I don’t know why you’re freaking out. You freaking out is doing nothing but losing your oxygen,’ operator says

A woman who drowned after accidentally driving into floodwater was told to “shut up” in the moments before she died by the operator who received her emergency call.

Debra Stevens died while delivering newspapers after becoming trapped on a submerged road in the US city of Fort Smith, Arkansas.

But when she phoned 911, the dispatcher told her: “This will teach you next time, don’t drive in the water.”

In the distressing audio of the 22-minute call, a clearly panicked Ms Stevens, 47, can be heard repeatedly saying she fears for her life as water pours into her SUV.

But the operator – since identified as Donna Reneau – was unmoved. “You’re not going to die,” she scolds. “I don’t know why you’re freaking out. You freaking out is doing nothing but losing your oxygen.”

She adds: “You’re going to need to shut up.”

The drowning woman is told help is on its way but Ms Reneau adds: “I don’t know how you didn’t see it [the water]. You had to go right over it. The water just didn’t appear.”

When Ms Stevens says she is about to be vomit, her interlocutor replies: “Well, you’re in water, you can throw up, it’s not going to matter.”

She eventually asks the dispatcher to pray with her. Ms Reneau replies: “You go ahead and start the prayer.”

In her final moments, Ms Stevens’ voice can be heard going underwater.

When rescuers finally reached her, more than an hour after she first called for help, she was dead.

A recording of the call – made at 4.38am on 24 August – was released as it emerged that Ms Reneau had been working her final shift at Fort Smith Police Department at the time.

Police chief Danny Baker said, in spite of the way Ms Stevens was spoken to, everything was done to save her at a time when the force was receiving a high number of emergency calls.

But he added: “We would all hope that we would get a little bit better response than perhaps she was given. I don’t want us interacting with anyone that way, whether it’s a life and death situation or not.”

Speaking to reporters, he said an investigation into the force’s dispatch policies would be undertaken but, asked if Ms Reneau would have been fired if she had not already left her job, he said it was unlikely.

“She did nothing criminally wrong,” he said. “I’m not even going to go as far as to say she violated policy.”