Bloody, dying dad waited hour for NYC ambulance, grieving daughter says — as slowing EMS response times probed

A dying Vietnam vet’s last thought before he died was why his New York City ambulance took nearly an hour to arrive, his grieving daughter told lawmakers Friday.

The horror story, recounted by an emotional Maisha Morales, was one of several told by New Yorkers during a City Council hearing over FDNY EMS’ soaring response times to life-threatening medical emergencies, which are nearly a minute longer than before the COVID-19 pandemic.

“As we waited for emergency services to arrive, each minute felt agonizing, filled with mounting fear,” she said about her father Antonio Morales’ last moments in August, when her mother found him lying on the floor in a “pool of blood and bloody diarrhea.”

The wait was so interminable that Morales’ father questioned why it took so long, she said, choking back tears.

When EMTs arrived nearly an hour later, Morales was stunned that the medics showed “no sense of urgency.”

“In fact, they look like they just woke up from a nap,” she said.

Antonio Morales died of cardiac arrest after medics finally got him to a hospital, his daughter said.

“Am I going crazy, or did it take the ambulance almost an hour to come?” his daughter recalled him saying just before he died.

The hearing by the Council’s fire and emergency management committee delved into the concerning rise in ambulance response times, and how to fix the possibly lethal problem.

FDNY ambulance and firefighter response times to life-threatening emergencies have spiked to an average of 7 minutes and 23 seconds this fiscal year, the mayor’s annual management report shows.

During the 2020 fiscal year, the response times were 6 minutes and 43 seconds, according to the report.

As the slowdown soared, four out of five New Yorkers who went into cardiac arrest died, data show.

Put another way — just 20% of all cardiac-arrest patients were revived by city firefighters and medics during the fiscal year ending June 30, which is the the worst success rate since the FDNY began tracking those numbers more than a decade ago, the report found.

One of those cardiac arrest victims was 24-year-old Nicholas Costello, whose father Tyler Weaver recounted to council members the painful December 2023 night an ambulance took 20 minutes to arrive.

Costello’s heart stopped at 5 a.m. in the Bronx, Weaver said.

“That’s a time when there’s not a lot of traffic, and he waited 20 minutes for an advanced life support paramedic unit,” Weaver said.

“The backup basic life support unit took 24 minutes. He was taken to the ER, but he had already suffered major brain injury because his heart had been stopped for so long due to the six steps of brain damage. Our son was taken off life support, pronounced dead the following day.”

After his son’s death, Weaver said he learned that all local ambulances were sent to stand by at a fire burning in a row of unoccupied stores.

“The inability to properly resource both EMS incidents at the same time that night is alarming and demonstrates a serious lack of Bronx ambulance resources,” he said.

City officials have blamed the slowdown on increases in medical emergencies, hospital turnaround times and congestion on Big Apple streets.

The FDNY is implementing measures like telemedicine and hospital liaison officers to improve efficiency, officials said during the hearing.

“If we can reduce the number of unnecessary 911 calls that will free up dispatches and alleviate the burden on emergency medical technicians and paramedics in the field,” FDNY Chief of EMS Operations Michael Fields told the Council.

“The more we can focus our efforts on genuine emergencies, the better we can serve those patients,” Fields said.

Fields also acknowledged recruitment and retention issues, but said the FDNY was working on those matters.

“We have an all hands on deck approach towards recruiting additional people, offering training to people who aren’t EMTs already. We’re willing to train them,” he testified.

“So we’re trying our best to improve on our recruitment numbers so that we can long term, retain more employees.”