Local police in Wisconsin have released a gripping recording: an eight-year-old boy called 911 because he couldn’t wake up his unconscious father up who was slumped over in the driver’s seat of their car.
The boy was in the silver Chevy Cruze with his two siblings, aged six and four, when he grabbed his father’s cellphone to call for help.
“I think my dad’s dead. He’s not waking up for anything,” the boy said sobbing.
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A dispatcher with the Waukesha Police Department was trying to get the boy’s exact location and asked him to describe what he saw around him.
“There’s a lot of trees,” the boy said in a shaky voice.
By then, dispatchers were able to intercept the phone call and figure out that the car was in the parking lot of a Waukesha School District building in Waukesha, Wis., near Milwaukee.
In the phone call, you can also hear a passerby who found the family in distress. The man took the phone and told the dispatcher he was on his way to a meeting when he found the boy crying. Koeberl had a pulse, the man said in the call.
The incident happened on Jan. 25 and Koeberl has been charged with three counts of child neglect, operating a motor vehicle while intoxicated and operating a motor vehicle while revoked.
Police are calling the eight-year-old boy extremely courageous for calling dispatchers.
“He showed a great deal of courage and maturity. It’s a very high stressful situation … you’re eight years old and you have your six- and four-year-old brother in the car with you and here your father is slumped over on the wheel,” Dan Baumann, captain of police, Waukesha Police Department told Global News.
According to a police report provided to Global News, Koeberl admitted to snorting three Xanax pills before getting into his car and picking up his kids from school. Police used Narcan, which blocks the effects of an overdose, to revive him at the scene. He appeared in court on Monday.
Baumann said the drug addiction crisis has really put a strain on police forces.
“This is not a Waukesha, Wisconsin issue, this is a nationwide issue and a global epidemic that the police department and the district attorney can’t arrest our way out of.”
“This is a community concern. We need doctors to make sure that they are having conversations with their patients relative to prescription medication and proper usage and dosage.”
Drug overdose deaths are on the rise in the United States. Prescriptions for benzodiazepines such as Xanax or Valium have more than tripled and fatal overdoses have more than quadrupled in the past 20 years, researchers at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York have found.
“It’s a freight train of death. There are more cases of overdose and overdose fatalities than they are recovery,” Baumann said.
— With files from Reuters.
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