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An effort full of tragedy, red tape

Frank Griswold lost his teenage son to delays in the ambulance system he wanted to reform.

By BILL COATS
Published August 1, 2005

LUTZ - Jason Griswold, 19, was striking out for an afternoon of fun, of romping in his red pickup truck through mud bogs in Lakeland.

Then, another asthma attack.

Jason steered into the grass next to a Livingston Avenue cow pasture. He turned on his nebulizer and tried to breathe with it. It wasn't enough. He called 911 on his cellular phone.

Philip Appeldorn answered in the communications bureau of the Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office. Jason was gasping. He couldn't say where he was. For 31/2 minutes, Jason and Appeldorn stayed connected, to no avail.

Suddenly help came from another source. Jason's friend Jesse Mallory happened along Livingston, recognized the truck and stopped. He found Jason unresponsive and drooling.

Mallory raced down Livingston to a Hess gasoline station so he, too, could call 911.

On that Saturday afternoon in 2001, there was tragic irony in the fact that the sufferer gasping for an ambulance was named Griswold. Five years earlier, Jason's father, E. Frank Griswold III, had launched an effort to start a private ambulance service. When local government thwarted him, Griswold blamed good-old-boy politics and filed a lawsuit. A federal grand jury indicted two top Tampa officials on extortion charges, which were dismissed 17 months later.

Griswold settled his lawsuit and applied again for ambulance permits. He was awarded six in 2001. Turmoil turned to optimism.

Ten days later, asthma struck Jason in his pickup truck. Frank Griswold's odyssey took another sharp turn. Now, he was on a course of personal grief and financial ruin, much of which he lays today at the feet of Hillsborough County's ambulance system.

* * *

When somebody called 911 in 2001, unable to say where he was, call takers were supposed to see a location on their computer screens. The Federal Communications Commission had mandated in 1996 that cell phone companies install equipment to show emergency dispatchers which cell tower was relaying the call. The deadline: 1998.

Such equipment would have told dispatchers on Aug. 18, 2001, that Jason was near a tower off Livingston Avenue and the Pasco County line. Hillsborough County and AT&T Wireless Services, Jason's cell phone company, had spent four years working out equipment specifications and a service agreement. But the equipment hadn't been installed at that time. So the emergency system could do nothing for Jason Griswold for 51/2 minutes after he called.

Then Jesse Mallory barged into the Hess station, pleading for somebody to call 911. Handed a phone, Mallory provided details and an exact location. The sheriff's call taker transferred Mallory to an ambulance call taker. Via computer, a dispatcher assigned a rescue ambulance in Lutz.

The command was meant to send information to the paramedics' pagers and the "tear-and-go" printer in their Lutz station. A horn was supposed to blast.

But the system had been malfunctioning that day. The paramedics were outside and didn't hear a radio call.

Mallory returned to his pal's side. So did Dave Davis, a Tampa Electric Co. technician who overheard Mallory's call.Davis knew CPR. He pulled the pale, unconscious Jason from his truck and went to work.

For more than five minutes, nobody at the Emergency Dispatch Center realized no one was en route. A hotline phone call finally dispatched the crew at 4:03 p.m. They arrived in five minutes - 20 minutes after Jason first gasped for help.

There was little hope.

An hour later, Dr. Richard Balbin pronounced Jason dead at University Community Hospital.

* * *

More than a year passed before most of Hillsborough County's various cell phone services deployed the equipment to identify which cell tower is relaying a 911 call. AT&T Wireless deployed on April 30, 2003 - 20 months after Jason died. It was the fifth of seven local companies to do so.

Joe Reavy, the county's 911 manager, said the process took so long because of a tangle of legal and technical complexities.

"I believe it could have been done quicker," Reavy said. "How much quicker is hard to say."

A month after Jason's death, the Emergency Dispatch Center reprimanded a supervisor for not doing more about the tear-and-go malfunctions on the day Jason died. The supervisor had rebooted the system, and thought it was fixed, said Joni Taylor, manager of the county's Emergency Dispatch Center. A dispatcher was counseled about not making sure the paramedics were en route.

Hillsborough Fire Rescue clarified its rules, requiring paramedics monitor their radios 7 a.m. to 11 p.m., even when in the station.

Griswold asked for the tape of Jason's 911 call.

"I'd like to hear my son," he said.

But the sheriff's recording system was on the blink when Jason called. He wasn't recorded.

In 2003, Griswold sued Hillsborough County, AT&T Wireless Services and Colin Beach, a New Tampa physician who changed Jason's allergy medication the day before he died. The case has not yet come to trial.

* * *

Jason's death transformed his father's outlook. Now, Griswold wanted more than an ambulance company. He wanted to reform the system.

"Somehow my son falls victim to the system that I said was so bad," said Griswold, 54.

Griswold thinks the fire and police agencies serving Hillsborough's local governments should consolidate their grid systems and dispatching computers to speed the transfer of calls.

Politics and turf rivalries stand in the way, he said.

Griswold's perspective is the by-the-numbers rescue system of the U.S. Army. Griswold retired in Tampa as a major in 1995, following a career in military medical roles such as flying helicopter ambulances and managing a hospital.

In the private sector, Griswold's 1996 bid for ambulances had run afoul of the Hillsborough Public Transportation Commission. Nationally based ambulance services already with permits fought his application. The Tampa Fire Department said the field was crowded. He was voted down.

Six months later, the transportation commissioner who led the rejection of Griswold's application submitted one of his own. He was Ronnie Mason, then-chairman of the Tampa City Council and former chief of the Tampa Fire Department. This time, the fire department said more ambulances were needed.

Mason got his permits; his company operates today as AmeriCare Ambulance Service.

Eventually, Mason and his business partner, lawyer David Carr, spent 17 months under a federal indictment charging they extorted the silence of a would-be ambulance rival. The U.S. attorney dismissed the charges without comment as a trial approached in 2000. The next year, in the wake of Jason's death, Griswold had to integrate his six new ambulances - their orange logos designed by Jason - into the same system. In an antitrust lawsuit filed in April, Griswold contends that he was promptly hoodwinked into unfair arrangements for dividing calls.

Hillsborough's county-employed paramedics working for Fire Rescue respond to emergency calls such as Jason Griswold's. Milder cases calling for only "basic life support," such as a broken foot in a car crash, are passed to private companies.

When Griswold's new company, Med Evac, started up, the director of the Transportation Commission proposed a rotation system dividing all calls among Med Evac and three other ambulance companies. Griswold thought Med Evac would receive every fourth call in each zone. The rotation worked differently. The ambulance company listed first received every call until it had no more ambulances. First in western Hillsborough: American Medical Response, which had 33 ambulances. First in eastern Hillsborough: AmeriCare, which had 13.

Taylor, the Emergency Dispatch Center manager, said the computers couldn't be programmed for a call-for-call rotation.

Griswold expected the USF area to generate many calls, but said he didn't realize 60 percent would be canceled as Med Evac was en route, and the rate of uninsured patients would be one of the highest in the county. Beset by financial problems, Med Evac filed for bankruptcy in November 2003.

County lawyers wouldn't discuss details of Griswold's suit. But Rob Brazel, litigation manager in the office, said Griswold mostly has himself to blame.

"Each step of the way, as that thing was put together, he agreed to it," Brazel said. "Everything was fine until it didn't turn out the way he wanted it to."

Altogether, the suit targets more than 20 defendants. Last week, U.S. District Judge Richard Lazzara rejected a swarm of motions to dismiss the case.

Congress recently did Med Evac a favor. It required that veterans hospitals give preference to contractors who are disabled veterans. Griswold has shrapnel in his left knee from Vietnam and a pacemaker in his chest from MacDill Air Force Base.

Med Evac was poised recently to land a contract with the James Haley VA Medical Center, but conditions imposed by the county made it unworkable for him.

* * * *

Griswold's life has been punctuated by personal setbacks.

Soon after his initial rejection by the Transportation Commission, he suffered heart problems. That crippled a respiratory-therapy business he ran, forcing Griswold and his wife into bankruptcy.

Over the next two years, his 26-year marriage collapsed. He lost his Lutz home to foreclosure.

In 2001, Jason died.

In 2002, Griswold remarried. But his new wife, Kristie, was injured five months later in a traffic accident and died a year later.

Griswold soon remarried.

* * *

Griswold regularly visits the spot where Jason collapsed. A cross is there, placed by Jason's friends. He pulls weeds. He talks to his son. He cries.

After graduating from Gaither High School, Jason started classes at Hillsborough Community College and became a zookeeper at the Busch Animal Outpost near Dade City, a second home for Busch Gardens animals. Frank Griswold foresaw Jason someday taking over a thriving ambulance company. But Jason is gone. Med Evac is on life support. And Frank Griswold and Hillsborough County's ambulance system are left in each other's clutches.

--Bill Coats can be reached at 813 269-5309 or coats@sptimes.com

[Last modified August 1, 2005, 00:58:09]