A clever 911 dispatcher helped a woman escape her abuser after she called emergency services to order a pizza. Tim Teneyck had worked as a dispatcher for the past 14 years when the call came in, and it didn’t take him long to realize that the woman on the other end of the line wanted help, not dinner.
- The woman insisted she was calling for a pizza. While Tim first told the caller that she had the wrong number for a pizza, when he reiterated her request to her, she again insisted that yes, she was calling for a pizza. “You’re not understanding,” she told him. Something clicked for Tim at that point and he realized that there was something more dangerous going on.
- Tim believed there domestic violence going on and he was right. Using coded language, Tim and the woman on the line managed to communicate that help needed to be sent to the address and that someone was being abused. Given that it will have sounded to anyone else as if she really was ordering pizza, this was an incredibly creative way to get help.
- Tim sent the police over to the woman’s address. He made sure to tell the officers heading over that this was a domestic violence situation and that they’d need to turn their sirens off before arriving at her property so as not to alert the abuser and cause further trouble or distress.
- It wasn’t until later that Tim found out what was really going on. It turns out that the woman’s boyfriend was domestically abusing her mother and the only way she could think to get around it was to try to call and “order pizza” to get help to the address. Thankfully, she reached Tim on the other end and he realized exactly what was going on and was able to help.
