Tim Teneyck has been a 911 dispatcher in Oregon, Ohio, for the past 14 years. So when he recently received a call from a woman who wanted to order pizza delivery, he assumed she had the wrong number.
Before hanging up, Tim reiterated the caller’s request. “You called 911 to order a pizza?!”
The woman on the other end of the line didn’t flinch. She then gave Tim her address and apartment number, but Tim was still confused by the strange exchange. But he didn’t hang up.
“You’re not understanding,” she insisted.
Despite the fact he’d never received a call like this in his 14 years on the job, Tim realized something was very wrong.
This woman was in a terrifying situation that she couldn’t get out of — alleged domestic violence, Tim surmised — and it was up to him to help her.
Tim began using a coded language in order to get more information from the distressed caller, in a way that wouldn’t set off any alarms on her end.
When he dispatched police to the caller’s residence, he made sure to tell the police to turn their sirens off.
It wasn’t until the Oregon Police Department arrived on scene that Tim discovered what his caller had been so desperately trying to escape.