Internal Bleeding

It was Easter Sunday of 1997, and David Thayer had just come home from a family feast at his grandparents' house when his phone rang. It was his buddy, Elmo Wilcox, who was whooping it up at D.J.'s Bar on State Avenue in Kansas City, Kansas. Wilcox wanted to take his prized bike -- a 1980 Harley Sturgiss Wideglide with lots of chrome trim -- out for a ride, and he wanted Thayer to go with him. Over the din of the bar, Wilcox hollered out to the bartender, "We need three more shots!"

Thayer had been friends with Wilcox since their days at Eisenhower Middle School in Kansas City, Kansas, and they had been through some rough times. Wilcox had lived with Thayer at his Overland Park home for six months during Wilcox's divorce, and he worked as a driver for Thayer's company, V.I.P. Limousines. So Thayer spared no words in warning Wilcox not to bike drunk.

"I said, 'You need to get your butt home and put your bike up and go get your car. You can drink all you want in your car, but go put that bike up. You don't drink shots and ride your bike!'" Thayer remembers. Wilcox did not heed his friend's advice.

Wilcox left the bar on his bike with two other guys behind him. The three roared up to a red light in front of Wal-Mart at 65th Street. Wilcox drove through the stoplight, speeding up the hill at about 90 miles per hour. As he topped the hill, a long-bed Chevy pickup turned in front of him, and Wilcox smashed into it at full throttle. He wasn't wearing a helmet.

Thayer's phone rang again. It was another buddy of his, a firefighter who had responded to the scene of Wilcox's wreck. "Your buddy Elmo's been in an accident, and it doesn't look good," the firefighter told him. Thayer rushed to the emergency room at the University of Kansas Medical Center, where he found Wilcox's father, stepmother, brother, and ex-wife -- and Wilcox's high-school sweetheart, Michelle Miller, a Metropolitan Ambulance Services Trust paramedic whose coworkers had alerted her to the accident.

After Wilcox had been in surgery for two hours, a doctor came out and began describing the injuries. If Wilcox lived, the doctor said, he would lose an arm and a leg and would be hooked up to bags for all of his bodily functions. The accident had left him ripped open from the inside of his left leg across his stomach, and he had severe head injuries.

Before she left the emergency room, Miller took Thayer aside. Her coworkers had told her about what had happened at the scene of the accident. She told Thayer that rescue workers could have had Wilcox to the hospital 20 minutes sooner if a power struggle hadn't broken out between the MAST emergency medical crews and the firefighters at the scene.

"The fire truck blocked the ambulance in," she told him in a hushed voice.

She said the firefighters had called in a Life Flight chopper and had prevented MAST crews from taking the patient straight down College Parkway to I-70 East and to the hospital. Then the firefighters shut down heavily traveled State Avenue so the chopper could land.

Miller still gets angry about what happened to the man she used to go roller skating and joyriding with when they were teenagers. "There was no reason for the fire department to call a helicopter, because there was perfect access where they were," she tells the Pitch. "You use your helicopter for your remote areas, like west of I-435. At 72nd and State Avenue, there's no reason to have a helicopter. What was involved in landing that chopper in the middle of that mess was just asinine. And why wait 15 minutes for the chopper to fly over and land?" she rants. "It was all about who's gonna have the most power on the scene, and the kid's dead now. Would that extra 20 minutes have saved him? Who knows."

When the waiting family members were informed that Wilcox was dead, four hours had passed from the time he had been brought in.

Even before the pronouncement, Thayer knew his friend was in bad shape and wouldn't have wanted to live as an amputee anyway, so he only half-listened to what Miller was telling him.

Miller, who no longer works for MAST, says that while MAST crews "probably wouldn't have the balls" to blatantly try to control an accident scene the way firefighters did, patients can still become pawns in a power struggle between the entities -- one that has been going on since the firefighters first proposed taking over emergency medical services for Kansas City.

That unhealthy competition with the fire department may just be the most obvious example of internal problems at the ambulance-service provider. But when MAST's own employees try to correct those problems from within, company management only half listens. Or worse yet, according to some former and current employees who spoke with the Pitch, those outspoken employees lose their jobs.