A North Carolina emergency dispatcher has been suspended after his “unacceptable comments” connected to Maya Angelou’s death were recorded on a 911 call, the county says.
Forsyth County suspended John Ruckh after it reviewed 911 tapes from the Wednesday call reporting the famed poet and activist had died, the Winston-Salem Journal reported.
During the 7-minute phone call, Ruckh can be heard in the background discussing a controversial Oprah Winfrey interview in which she talked about racism.
Angelou, 86, and Winfrey were good friends.
Ruckh was not the 911 dispatcher who answered the call, but he was in the room with the employee who did, so his comments were heard on the tape.
The conversation in the call’s background is muffled, but at one point Ruckh said, “Oprah has fallen out of grace” and asked other dispatchers if they saw her controversial interview.
Ruchk goes on to explain her November interview with BBC.
“There are still generations of people, older people, who were born and bred and marinated in it, in that prejudice and racism, and they just have to die,” Winfrey said in the interview. She also says she believes some people disrespect President Obama because he is black.
In the recorded conversation, Ruckh paraphrases Winfrey’s statements, and it sounds like he’s calling the interview a “rant.”
“These comments are unacceptable and we have opened an internal investigation to look into the circumstances surrounding this event,” Forsyth County EMS director Dan Ozimek said in a statement.
Ruckh has worked for the county EMS for 24 years.
“Unfortunately, I work in a high-profile job and everything’s recorded,” Ruckh told the Winston-Salem Journal. “This is in no way a racial slur, slander, associated conversation.”
Ruckh said he respected Angelou and regrets the timing of the conversation.
“I really hate that this happened at the time that it did, because this is taking away from Maya Angelou’s passing,” he told the newspaper.
EMS staff has praised the dispatcher who answered the phone call, Shannon Brooks, for how he handled the call.
Recorded on the 911 tape, Brooks talks Angelou’s caretaker through CPR while she waits for paramedics to arrive.
