Natalie Lucio, a longtime musician in Portland, Oregon, was driving to work at her day job on Dec. 8, 2022, when she said a drunk driver crashed into her.
“I was in front of the Portland Village School (a public K-8 charter school) when he T-boned me at about twice the speed limit, which was 20,” she told me.
Lucio said the crash happened at 7:16 a.m. at the intersection of North Delaware Avenue and Russet Street.
At the time she was driving her fiancé Shawn Alvey’s pickup truck. The collision was so strong, she said she had to walk a half-block from where she was hit to retrieve the front bumper.
“The vehicle I was in is now undrivable and the force of the impact was hard enough to injure my cervical spine, give me a concussion, and has limited my mobility,” Lucio explained in December.
She said at first the man who hit her kept going.
“He drove one more block away from where I was struck and had first pulled over like he didn’t want to pull over near me,” she told me.
Lucio said he was driving a black Dodge Dakota pickup truck, possibly a 1990s model, with a dealer plate “stuffed in” where a license plate should be.
A woman Lucio identified as a witness, who asked not to be named publicly, told me she had just walked her kids to school when she saw the crash.
“He hit her hard, really hard,” she told me. “When I walked up to the window she looked dead. Pure white.”
The witness said the man pulled up the street and Lucio followed him. The witness followed too.
The man then got out of the black truck stumbling, the witness explained, and in slurred words, while flailing his arms repeatedly said, “We’re OK. Everything’s OK. She’s OK. Everyone can go now.”
The witness said she smelled alcohol on the man’s breath. He and Lucio talked, she told me, before he left in the truck he was driving. Lucio and the witness said one of the wheels on the Dakota was turned inward.
Lucio said she tried to get the man to give her his phone number, and she snapped a photo of the truck as he drove away. Police have not reported making an arrest, nor would they tell me whether they consider the truck in the photo a suspect vehicle.
“I was in such shock,” Lucio said.
After Alvey, her partner, showed up she said her first thought was to call AAA and have his pickup truck towed because it carried expensive tools and she didn’t want to leave it on the street.
Lucio said she gathered contact information from two witnesses. She and Alvey tried calling Portland’s non-emergency dispatch number several times from different phones, she told me, but after a brief hold, the calls were auto-disconnected before they could talk to anyone. The couple sent me screen grabs of call records from their cell phones that they say show multiple non-emergency calls ranging in length from 21 seconds to around a minute.
Lucio also put up a post about the incident on Facebook and messaged people in the neighborhood. Alvey said someone identified the truck and ultimately the driver from a “WTFPORTLAND” Instagram video of an incident in which he allegedly threw a crowbar at people after trying to steal gas. Lucio said both hit-and-run witnesses identified the man in the video as the driver who struck her, though police would not tell me whether they consider him a suspect. Others shared images and the location of what they said was the Dodge Dakota the man was driving parked nearby.
When she got home Lucio called 911 at 10:16 a.m. After she was put on hold for about 5 minutes a dispatcher picked up.
I obtained a recording of that call and others through a public records request.
Below is a call transcript:
Dispatcher: 911. What’s the address of your emergency?
Lucio: Well, I’m no longer at there because I couldn’t get through. I’m at my place of residence, but I’m getting ready to go to urgent care. I got hit and run by a drunk driver. And I have a picture of the vehicle, but he ran off.
Dispatcher: And how long ago did this happen?
Lucio: It was at 7:16 a.m.
Dispatcher: OK. So, yeah, do you need an ambulance? Do you need any emergency services from us at this point?
Lucio: Well, here’s the thing: The guy is drunk and he’s currently driving, and we think we have a picture of his location.
Dispatcher: Right now?
Lucio: Possible. He might be on ____ North Greeley Avenue because he hit me at the intersection in front of Portland Village School, and …
Dispatcher: So what’s the time frame when someone saw him parked in front of that address?
Lucio: It was just posted a few minutes ago.
Dispatcher: Was he inside the vehicle or outside of the vehicle?
Lucio: It looks like it’s parked outside.
Dispatcher: OK, so he’s parked. OK, here’s the deal. You’re not going to like this, but I have to not take it on this call. This is 911 on this line. I can’t take it.
Lucio: I said that there was an injury that …
Dispatcher: Do you need an ambulance?
Lucio: I don’t want to pay for an ambulance.
Dispatcher: OK. You said you were going to urgent care, so I can’t help you with that. So you have to do the urgent care. I have to give you the non-emergency number to report this. We’ll definitely have an officer contact you if you’re going to. I know you’re going to be …
Lucio: I can’t get through …
Dispatcher: Let me finish, OK? You are going to be on hold for a while, OK. You can make this report any time. You have all the information you need. It’s not a stress-worthy thing. So deal with your, OK, I’m going to give you the different number. I have to give you a different number. I cannot take it on this call on this line. OK, here you go.
Transcript of 911 call placed by Natalie Lucio on Dec. 8, 2022 at 10:16 a.m. (Sound Recording/Portland Bureau of Emergency Communications)
Lucio was not transferred to the non-emergency line. Instead, records show the call was disconnected.
“So after the dispatcher from 911 hung up on me, I was angry and I was upset,” Lucio told me. “I was sort of crying and at that time, the adrenaline was kind of starting to wear off and I was starting to feel more and more pains when I tried to move. And I was like, maybe I do need an ambulance.”
Alvey called 911 again and requested paramedics.
The same dispatcher answered and told him an ambulance was on the way. Besides asking when it happened she did not request details about the hit-and-run.
“I would set up a call for an officer to contact her, if you’d like, on the phone,” the dispatcher said. “But if she’s going to be in the emergency room and go to an ambulance, probably not gonna be able to do that. So she’ll have to call back later for that.”
Alvey continued to repeatedly call the non-emergency line. Eventually, he talked to a dispatcher and reported the incident at 11:53 a.m. Lucio said he got through while she was being assessed and treated at Legacy Good Samaritan Medical Center.
The couple said 911 and the non-emergency line hung up on them more than 35 times altogether before Alvey was able to file a report.
911 call investigation
The Bureau of Emergency Communications (BOEC) provides 911 and non-emergency dispatch services to several areas in Multnomah County including Portland.
On Jan. 13, BOEC responded to a public records request it charged me $40 for about a month earlier. The agency provided me with recordings of multiple 911 and non-emergency calls that Lucio and Alvey placed on the day of the hit-and-run crash, and on Dec. 12 when Lucio called the non-emergency line again. She said she did so because an officer hadn’t yet spoken to her, a claim police dispute.
BOEC said it’s investigating Lucio’s initial 911 call made at 10:16 a.m. on Dec. 8 and why it was sent to the non-emergency line before it was disconnected. The bureau said the call “may have met the criteria to be processed by 911 due to potentially knowing the location of a suspect’s vehicle.”
The other recorded calls “met our protocols,” a statement from BOEC said.
The second part of my public records request was for call detail records showing how many times calls were made to 911 and the non-emergency line from Lucio and Alvey’s phone numbers as well as when the calls took place including the time of day, date, and the duration of each call.
That request could not be fulfilled according to Jaymee Cuti, a BOEC spokesperson. After a lengthy exchange of emails, she told me the agency does not keep caller ID information including phone numbers of people who call the non-emergency line.
“Unlike a 911 call, caller information to the non-emergency line is only captured manually by the call-taker if the call results in being set up as a call for service, which was the case with the recordings you received,” she explained Wednesday.
Cuti also told me that day that BOEC does not routinely keep records on when the non-emergency system reaches capacity, nor does it keep records on the number of times the system auto-disconnects non-emergency callers before they reach a dispatcher. The bureau does keep track of the number of times callers hang up before reaching a person.
On Tuesday, the day before she made those admissions, Cuti sent me an email saying in part:
The multiple calls made by Ms. Lucio and Mr. Alvey were made to the City’s automated non-emergency phone tree, which triages calls. Once determined that a caller needs to speak with a call-taker, it attempts to transfer the call. Our current technology only allows for 28 concurrent non-emergency calls to be in queue. Any calls beyond 28 are not transferred. Given that we were at capacity when most of Ms. Lucio’s and Mr. Alvey’s calls were made, the call was not transferred after the automated triage and was disconnected by the phone service provider.
From email sent by Jaymee Cuti, a BOEC spokesperson, on Tuesday, Feb. 7.
Cuti attached call volume reports for Dec. 8 and 12 to her email.
“As you can see from the data, several callers to the non-emergency line experienced extended hold times on Dec. 8 and we were at capacity,” she told me. “On Dec. 12, several non-emergency calls were held for an extended period of time, however, the phone lines were not at full capacity.”
Although the data she provided Tuesday showed a marked uptick in call volume and wait times when Lucio and Alvey were calling, it did not indicate when the system reached capacity. I asked Cuti if BOEC keeps that data and she admitted Wednesday it usually does not.
I then sent the following email:
I do have to ask, if “BOEC does not routinely keep records on when the non-emergency system reaches capacity” then how could you make these statements?:
“Given that we were at capacity when most of Ms. Lucio’s and Mr. Alvey’s calls were made, the call was not transferred after the automated triage and was disconnected by the phone service provider.”
“As you can see from the data, several callers to the non-emergency line experienced extended hold times on Dec. 8 and we were at capacity.”
Do records exist from Dec. 8 and 12 showing the system was at capacity? If so, can you share them with me?
And if BOEC doesn’t routinely keep records on when the non-emergency system reaches capacity, how do you know this feature of the non-emergency line is working correctly?:
“Our current technology only allows for 28 concurrent non-emergency calls to be in queue. Any calls beyond 28 are not transferred.”
Email Discrepancy Report Editor Joe Douglass sent to Jaymee Cuti and other BOEC communications staff members on Wednesday, Feb. 8.
Six hours later Cuti sent me an email saying:
BOEC has been responsive to your requests for information and has provided information thoroughly and in good faith. We have no additional information to add on this matter. If you have data requests, please submit them to the Public Records portal, portlandoregon.gov/PRR.
Email sent by Jaymee Cuti, a BOEC spokesperson, on Wednesday, Feb. 8.
I submitted a public records request that night and the portal sent me a message saying in part:
Pursuant to ORS 192.329(6)(a) and (c), the Bureau of Emergency Communications (BOEC) will not be able to complete its response to your public records request for an additional 30 business days due to staff absences and the volume of public records requests simultaneously being processed.
Message BOEC sent through Portland’s public records portal on Wednesday, Feb. 8.
But on the evening of Friday, Feb. 10, at 8:08 p.m. PST, BOEC responded to my public records request. The agency’s response refers to screen grabs of call records from Lucio and Alvey’s phones that they say show some but not all of the non-emergency calls they made on Dec. 8:
BOEC does not routinely keep records on when the non-emergency system reaches capacity. However, any time we have an inquiry about call volume, or the capacity of our non-emergency lines, we can access the incoming call data to rebuild the moment in time manually. That is the data that we previously provided to you.
Using the times and duration of the calls, we can recreate the number of lines that were occupied at the time of your inquiry. Attached is the data that tells us that non-emergency lines were at capacity, created from raw data. We filtered the call volume for that day for non-emergency only and listed only the calls that were either active or in queue. This data specifically drills down on the same time frame of calls made by Ms. Lucio and Mr. Alvey. Previously, we had given you the call volume for a multiple hour time span containing those calls. This attachment is narrower.
According to the information that you provided, there were 31 attempts to contact non-emergency between 10:43 a.m. and 10:49 a.m. As you will see, all 28 of our non-emergency lines were occupied during the six minutes that Ms. Lucio and Mr. Alvey’s calls were made. There are three calls that made it through, which are highlighted, but only seconds after a line was relinquished by the previous caller.
Callers to BOEC’s non-emergency line hear the recorded greeting below, indicating that calls may be disconnected when our non-emergency lines are at capacity:
“You have reached the Portland, Oregon and Multnomah County public safety non-emergency response line. For emergency police, fire or medical calls, hang-up and dial 9-1-1 now. Otherwise please stay on the line and know that when call volume exceeds the number of available phone lines, your call may be disconnected. If that happens, please try your call again or call back at a later time. Our busiest hours are between 11 a.m. and 8 p.m.”
Message sent by BOEC on the evening of Feb. 10.
Cuti told me improvements to BOEC’s system are in the works:
We know 911 callers are often waiting much longer than they should to reach a call taker. The national standard is to answer all 911 calls within 15 seconds or less. In the attached report from the BOEC director, you’ll see that only 39 percent of 911 calls in December were answered within 15 seconds with the average wait time at 54 seconds. This is not acceptable to us. We are urgently working to hire and train additional call takers, and implement new technology to reduce hold times on both 911 and the non-emergency number. We are also working closely to shift many non-emergency calls to Portland’s new 311 call center.
From email sent by Jaymee Cuti, a BOEC spokesperson, on Tuesday, Feb. 7.
The investigation into Lucio’s initial 911 call is not complete, Cuti explained. She said if staff members find that it did not meet agency standards it will be addressed between the employee and their supervisor “in accordance with the collective bargaining agreement.”
Busy signals
For some comparative research, I contacted several 911 call centers that take emergency and non-emergency calls. In the law enforcement community, they’re known as public safety answering points (PSAPs).
Ten responded. None reported having a policy like BOEC’s of auto-disconnecting callers from non-emergency lines when they reach capacity.
Four of the PSAPs that replied to me are in Oregon including the Washington County Consolidated Communications Agency, which serves part of the Portland metropolitan area, Willamette Valley Communications Center, which serves Lincoln County as well as Marion and Polk counties where the state capital Salem is located, the Deschutes County 911 Service District which includes Bend, and Emergency Communications of Southern Oregon, which serves Jackson County where Medford and Ashland are located.
The six out-of-state PSAPs that responded include the Los Angeles Police Department in California and Milwaukee Police Department in Wisconsin, which run their own non-emergency lines, the Baltimore County 911 Center in Maryland, the Shelby County 911 Emergency Communications District in Memphis, Tennessee, as well as the Seattle 911 Center and Spokane Regional Emergency Communications in Washington.
Instead of being auto-disconnected when the non-emergency line is tied up Shelby County has an auto-attendant that can answer calls, according to the agency’s director.
The LAPD and MPD have callers wait on hold until there is an available operator.
In Baltimore County, officials say an automated message tells the caller to hold for the next available operator. If the caller chooses to end the call, their number is placed in the queue for a callback.
The six other PSAPs that responded say callers hear a busy signal when the non-emergency line is at capacity.
Emergency Communications of Southern Oregon as well as the PSAPs in Washington County, Baltimore County, Shelby County, and Spokane say they store caller ID information on non-emergency callers. The other five agencies do not.
“We have not ever reached full capacity on our non-emergency lines,” Sara Crosswhite, the director of the Deschutes County 911 Service District, told me, noting that it can handle no more than 25 calls at once. “To date, the most we’ve ever had is 12 non-emergency calls at one time.”
The Seattle 911 Center has a capacity of holding at least 23 waiting non-emergency calls at one time before callers would receive a busy signal according to Bill Schrier, an interim strategic adviser.
Police response
In her police report about the hit-and-run, Officer Kelsey Buchanan says she called Alvey on Dec. 8, in response to his non-emergency call.
Buchanan says Alvey gave her Lucio’s phone number and that she called her that day.
Lucio and the witness I spoke with told Buchanan the suspect vehicle ran a stop sign, then struck Lucio, according to the report. Although the suspect initially looked as if he was stopping to exchange information, he soon left the scene, Lucio told the officer.
The report also says:
Ms. Lucio told me she initially tried to make it seem like it was her fault, because she said the driver was clearly impaired: disheveled, slurring his words and not walking straight. The suspect refused to give his name and number and told her she didn’t need it. That’s when Ms. Lucio told him it was her fault, trying to trick the suspect. The suspect then demanded $50 from the woman he just hit with his truck! The suspect began to walk back to his truck and drove off southbound on North Delaware Avenue heading across North Lombard Street. …
Both Ms. Lucio and (the witness) described the suspect as a white male in his 40s/50s with blonde/gray hair and shorter facial hair. The man was around 5′ 7″ with a thin build and leathery looking face.
From Portland Police Officer Kelsey Buchanan’s report filed Dec. 8.
Hospital staff began attending to Lucio while she was still on the phone with the officer, the report says, which prompted the conversation to end.
The report categorizes the “internal status” of the case as “inactive/suspended – lack of tangible leads.”
The witness I spoke with said the officer called her at around 2:30 p.m. on Dec. 8.
Lucio claims she did not talk to an officer until the following Monday, Dec. 12. That day records show she called the non-emergency line at around 9:35 a.m. and waited for more than 44 minutes to talk with a dispatcher who told her he’d have the police contact her.
About 10 minutes later, Lucio said an officer called her back.
“As I attempted to give him the basics of the crime that was committed, the location of the discarded vehicle that hit me along with several eye-witness accounts of his activities, he told me to stop talking over him,” she told me. “I then listened as he asked me to send an email with all of the pertinent information. He then told me that if the suspect was not with the vehicle at the time he went to check it out, there wasn’t anything more he would do.”
Lucio forwarded me emails she sent to the officer that include contact information for witnesses as well as images that she said show the man who struck her, the vehicle he was driving, and other details about his possible location and the incident itself.
None of that information is included in the redacted police report I received on Feb. 9. I filed a public records request for it on Dec. 20.
A Portland Police Bureau spokesperson would neither confirm nor deny Lucio’s claims about her conversation with the officer or Lucio’s account of a talk she said she had with a police captain in late December.
“The captain told me that there are year-old, fatal shootings, that the prosecutor or the DA are just dismissing because they don’t have the resources,” she said. “(He) basically told me that this city is in total chaos right now. … (He) told me that he does not have the resources, and will not pursue the case any further. … that even with all that information I sent … they cannot find or pick up the guy or even connect him to it unless he admits to it.”
Lucio told me she spoke with the captain after Alvey contacted Sam Adams, the former Portland mayor who before last month worked as current Mayor Ted Wheeler’s director of strategic innovations.
Lucio forwarded me what appeared to be an email exchange between her and Stephanie Howard, Wheeler’s director of community safety, in which Howard inquired about the case and expressed sympathy and Lucio detailed her findings and experiences.
Howard did not immediately respond to two emails I sent in January asking about the exchange.
‘The city that works’
Lucio has little hope that the man who struck her will ever face justice.
The effect the incident has had on her health, finances, and job as a union apprentice, which requires her to attend trade school at night, has been dire.
“I have lost wages. My school has suffered and I’ve developed massive anxiety attacks since all this started,” she explained. “And I’m pretty sure that nothing is going to come of it, and no one will be held accountable except for Shawn and I financially.”
The crash happened right before finals week at school, Lucio told me.
“I missed an opportunity that would’ve helped my grades because my meds legally prevent me from using the welding shop,” she said in December when loved ones set up a GoFundMe page to support her. “Add to the list my partner and I were using his (now undrivable) truck to move everything from my old apartment to his house. We now have to hire movers, which is difficult during the holiday season.”
Lucio said her job normally requires her to lift up to 50 pounds but since the crash, it’s been greatly limited.
“I am still on light duty because of some medications that I am on and some neurological symptoms persist,” she said in late January. “I can tell the second that the muscle relaxers wear off. It’s an almost instantaneous buildup of pressure and pain and you can hear my neck audibly snap when I try to turn it to the right. The neurological symptoms are pretty cut and dry. Something in my neck got smashed and now if I’m holding something in both hands, I have to be looking and concentrating on both of them because if I look away from one, I will drop it.”
Lucio said she was charged for the ambulance ride that took her to the closest hospital, which is all out of network for her HMO. She believes her medical condition was mishandled from the beginning.
“I am not a doctor, and I sure as hell don’t know when someone needs an ambulance or not, especially if it’s me and I’m in shock!” she told me on Feb. 5. “I did not get to see my primary care provider until eight days after the accident, so I was completely screwed out of my short-term disability pay that comes out of my check bi-weekly. Hopefully, I don’t lose any dexterity, as I am a guitar player, but I have the sneaking suspicion that my days of playing rec league softball are over. I let my medications wear off completely this weekend, and the pain was so unbearable that I was forced to leave the supermarket I was in.”
Lucio said she’s lived in Portland for 22 years but is considering moving elsewhere.
“I just can’t get over the irony of Portland’s slogan, ‘The city that works.'”
