Raleigh, N.C. — Sometimes when he drives home from work, his 12-hour shift in the rearview mirror, Jeff Mitchell sits in silence – no radio, no phone calls, nothing. When you’ve listened to a dying man take his last breath or a parent screaming as a child convulses on the floor, you don’t want to hear any more sounds.r6
In his years as a 911 call taker in Alaska and now at the Raleigh-Wake Emergency Communications Center, Mitchell has heard people at their worst and most vulnerable. He has been cursed at, cried to and hung up on. But he has also helped deliver babies, saved people with CPR and comforted a lonely, old lady.r11
“You never know when that phone rings what’s going to be on the other side,” Mitchell said. “This is one of the jobs where you have to be 100 percent all the time. You can’t have a bad day, because if you do, people die.”
