When a statue in front of a Fisherman's Wharf business toppled onto vacationing toddler Kayson Shelton, SFPD officers and San Francisco firefighters arrived on the scene almost immediately. However, perhaps the most important piece of the puzzle, the ambulance required to take a dying Shelton to the hospital, arrived far later that officials say it should have.
You probably know the sad circumstances of Shelton's death all too well: last Friday, the two-year-old boy, whose family was visiting San Francisco from Utah, climbed on a metal dolphin statue outside the Majestic Collection Art Gallery on 225 Jefferson. The statue then fell on top of the child. Kayson's dad, reportedly a doctor, called 911 at 11:30 AM, saying that Kayson had lost consciousness and had a bloody nose. Though the child seemed to be doing well, he was taken to SF General as a precaution. While at the hospital, his condition worsened, and he was pronounced dead at 3:40 PM due to internal abdominal injuries.
According to the Chron, SFPD officers arrived about 90 seconds after the 911 call, and firefighters got there a minute after that. However, it took a SF fire department ambulance 13 minutes to arrive at the scene, well over the department's goal of arrivals within 10 minutes.
SFFD spokesperson Mindy Talmadge told ABC7 that the reason for the delay was because "all of the ambulances that we had running were dispatched to calls." The nearest available ambulance was apparently at at Oak and Stanyan streets, about 4.5 miles from the injured child.
"Sometimes it's busier than others," Talmadge says. "During that particular hour we had 16 medical calls and there were 16 units."
SFFD Medical Director Clement Yeh tells KTVU that though the swiftly-arriving firefighters assessed the boy's medical needs, "In this case there were not any advanced life support measures that were performed."
"It was recognized early on that this boy needed to get to the hospital," Yeh said.
Obviously, the question that's being asked is that if those three minutes would have changed the outcome of Kayson's injuries. While Yeh suggests to ABC7 that it's difficult to determine if those few minutes would have made a difference, Talmadge seemed more certain in a conversation with KTVU, saying "Whether or not it would have made a difference, I think based on that information in this particular case, it probably would not have."
