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| ESD official target of complaint Wednesday, July 21, 2010 Carolea Hassard Officials with Parker County ESD #1 are mum about an incident in which a woman said she was badly treated when her husband was airlifted after a lawnmower accident.
ESD battalion chief Gary Brooks said he couldn’t talk because the case has gone to the district’s attorney, Ken Campbell of Austin.
ESD head administrator Deborah McLemore did not return a call for comment, nor did ESD board president Greg Martin. Campbell, who called the Epigraph apparently at the behest of McLemore, did make a comment, but only after a few minutes’ conversation which he said was off the record. The woman, Connie Cruz, complained that Brooks cursed her and her brother, Jimmie Woodford, when they drove up to an air ambulance landing zone. Connie wanted to find out which hospital her husband, Roel, was being taken to.
Roel had cut off some of the toes on his left foot in a lawnmower accident Sunday evening, Connie said. Springtown firefighters, who work under the auspices of the ESD, had set up a landing zone at the high school to airlift Roel to a hospital. When Connie and Woodford parked, Connie said Brooks came charging up to the car, yelling at them to get away. “He ran so hard at us he tripped and fell and rolled,” Connie said, “and he got angry. He was yelling, ’Back up! Back up! Back up!’” “I started running up to him,” Connie said. “I need to know where you’re taking my husband.” “He said, ‘Get your f-----g ass out of the way’ and he ran me up to the side of the school,” Connie said. Meanwhile, her brother had moved the car, she said, “but that wasn’t good enough for that guy,” Connie said. Connie said Brooks called the Springtown police. The responding officer, Connie McGee, did talk to the Epigraph about what she saw. “They were trying to get into the landing zone,” she said. “They were seated on the sidewalk when I got there. He (Brooks) said they had driven into the landing zone and he turned them around and she was running to helicopter.” McGee said Woodford was cursing at Brooks (Connie admitted her brother did so), but “understandably so. Everybody was excited and upset. “I tried to explain to her that you can’t go toward a helicopter because of the blades and you can’t go into the helicopter because of the weight limit,” McGee said. At some point, Springtown firefighter Connie Vestal “came over to help because I went into panic mode,” Connie said. “I started hurting in my chest. ‘I need my nitro tablets,’ I said.” Woodford fetched the tablets and Vestal helped her take a dose, she said. Connie eventually did find out which hospital her husband went to (Baylor in Dallas), where he took 180 stitches. Connie said he had been wearing plastic clogs while running a push mower. Roel was pulling the mower back a few steps but hit his heel against something and pulled the mower over his foot, cutting off his big and third toe and slicing through the second toe. Since surgery, he has three toes remaining on the left foot, she said. At the landing zone, Connie said Woodford demanded Brooks’ contact information and said he was going to make a complaint to his supervisor. Brooks responded, “‘I am the one in charge and there’s nothing anyone can do to me,’” Connie said. Brooks did hand Woodford his card, however, saying, “‘Call and do what you think you can do.’” Later, Woodford told his sister that McLemore said she could not give out the district’s mailing nor the email addresses of the ESD commissioners. Woodford asked, “‘Who pays you?’” Connie said. McLemore responded that the taxpayers did. Campbell told the Epigraph that McLemore did give Woodford the mailing address but not the email addresses. The commissioners’ email addresses are available only via a written open records request, he said. “Nobody refused to give anybody information,” he said. But to get the commissioners’ email addresses, “that has to be an open records request, as you know.” “Getting anything out of this department is ridiculous,” Connie said. She added that her attorney, Jerry Pittman of Dallas, is going to file a formal complaint. “All we wanted was an apology,” Connie said. “And Gary should be reprimanded a little bit because they’ve been trained to handle (someone in a panic), you’d think. “Once the helicopter was gone, Gary still wanted to argue and get the cop to issue a citation,” she said. No citations were issued, McGee said. |