Inside the chaotic response to a 911 call in Texas: 'Half of the family just disappeared'

It was 9:08 p.m. when Michael Negussie’s phone rang. Twenty minutes had passed since he called 911 asking for emergency crews to check on his cousins and their two children, fearing that they had fainted from carbon monoxide poisoning in their Houston home during a massive winter storm. A fire captain at the dispatch center told Negussie that an emergency crew had arrived at the two-story town house. But, he said, no one was answering the door. “It’s one of those things, if they get there and they have to force entry, they’re going to break the door, displace the lock,” the captain said, according to a recording of the 911 call. Negussie was baffled. Why would emergency responders expect someone to come to the door if the reason for the call was that the family was unconscious? “Yeah, that’s fine. Do that as soon as possible,” Negussie, 21, responded, trying to convey the urgency. “We think that they might have inhaled carbon monoxide in the garage.”

At any other time, Negussie would have driven the 24 miles from his home in Pearland, Texas, to his cousins’ southwest Houston neighborhood. But local government officials had urged Texans not to travel the ice-coated roads on this frigid Feb. 15 evening, concerned that they would endanger themselves and first responders. So Negussie and his parents put their faith in the emergency responders who had arrived at their cousins’ home. As the fire crew waited for more information about why the family was not answering the door, the captain at the dispatch center asked Negussie what made him believe his relatives had inhaled carbon monoxide. The power was out, Negussie explained. Their car, he had learned from someone who had spoken with the family earlier in the day, was running in the attached garage so they could charge their phones. Less than five minutes later, the fire crew was gone. The four family members, who had already spent hours unconscious, were left unattended and exposed to the lethal, invisible gas for nearly three more hours, according to documents from the Houston fire and police departments and recordings of 911 calls obtained by ProPublica, The Texas Tribune and NBC News. An operator at the dispatch center didn’t share the crucial details about Negussie’s carbon monoxide concerns with the crew at the scene, according to records and interviews with fire department officials. Police officers never arrived. Neither the Houston Police Department nor the city’s emergency center could find any records indicating the fire captain requested assistance.