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Paramedics were delayed for about 10 minutes shortly after 2 a.m. Friday as they tried to get someone to open interior security doors at a Heritage Landing apartment building from which a tenant had called for an ambulance.
An ambulance arrived at the building within seven minutes of being dispatched, said Marty Limpert, a spokesman for the St. Charles County Ambulance District.
But he said that once inside the building, paramedics were barred by locked security doors from going directly to the woman's apartment. They turned to a tenant directory in the lobby, found the woman's name and rang her apartment. There was no answer.
The paramedics began going down the list of other tenants, trying to find someone who would activate the unlocking device, said Danny Rowden, director of the county Department of Dispatch and Alarm.
"They rang up six apartments," he said, before a tenant was reached who would buzz them into the interior of the building.
The woman, Melba G. Morgan, 72, had died in the meantime. She had lived alone. Her daughter, Maureen Larson of St. Peters, said her mother had had a heart ailment and had been stricken with a heart attack once before. Limpert said this was the first incident he could recall when paramedics had difficulty getting to the interior of an apartment. But he said he was not surprised that six calls to other tenants had to be made before someone would buzz to unlock the interior doors. After all, he said, the sheriff and police caution people - especially the elderly - to be careful about unlocking their doors unless they know who is attempting to get in. Limpert said he expected to discuss the matter with apartment and nursing home managers in the county who might explore the prospect of providing police, paramedics and firefighters with a common coded mechanism to help open locked doors in an emergency.
Dennis Oquist, manager of the apartments at Heritage Landing, said he had never encountered a similar situation in the 15 years he has been managing apartments.
"All of them have the same type of interior door," he said, "and I've never had that problem."
He said firefighters would not have hesitated to break down the door. "I'm surprised that the paramedics didn't break a window in the lobby to get through," he said. "I should think they were trained to get into the building."
The incident raised questions about whether Morgan's call for an ambulance was handled appropriately by the dispatcher at the county's dispatching center in Wentzville. Rowden said the dispatcher was not to blame. The dispatcher, whom Rowden declined to identify, got the telephone call for help directly from the woman. He dispatched an ambulance to the correct street address but to Apartment 202, not to where she lived in Apartment 207.
When the dispatcher learned that paramedics were having trouble getting into the interior of the apartment, he tried to call the woman back but got only her answering machine. The dispatcher immediately called for the sheriff's department and fire rescue to respond, Rowden said.
Meanwhile, paramedics at the scene already had buzzed the woman's apartment and were trying to rouse other tenants to gain admittance. Rowden indicated that the dispatcher - himself a paramedic who was working part-time at the dispatch center - had acted appropriately.
Limpert suggested that the victim, because of her illness, was "having difficulty speaking," thus accounting for the dispatcher mishearing the apartment number. In any event, Limpert said, "We knew where we had to go, but just couldn't get in."
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