By Lincoln Anderson
Some were quick to fault the police response after East Village resident Jodie Lane was fatally electrocuted last month on a Con Edison service box cover on E. 11th St. According to witnesses, Lane, 30, was left lying on the electrified box up to 20 minutes — including 12 minutes during which police officers were at the scene waiting for an ambulance.
In an interview last week, Deputy Inspector James McCarthy of the Ninth Precinct defended the responding officers’ actions.
McCarthy, 40, the East Village precinct’s commanding officer for the last six months, said officers who arrived at the scene didn’t know at first what had happened to Lane.
“In the beginning, you could tell by the way when units first showed up, they didn’t know — all they kept saying is, ‘Put a rush on the bus,’ ” McCarthy said, using the police term for “ambulance.” “I think they felt that they had somebody that wasn’t breathing, was unconscious, maybe had a heart attack. But I don’t think they knew exactly what was going on — there were [reports of] dogs fighting….”
Lane, 30, a clinical psychological Ph.D. student who lived on E. 12th St., had been walking her two dogs on Jan. 16 when they came in contact with the slush-covered, electrified cover and started yelping wildly and fighting. Somehow, in separating the dogs, she came in contact with the cover, fell on it and was electrocuted.
According to a police spokesperson, as well as a civilian witness — the Veniero’s cashier — an officer tried to take Lane’s pulse. The officer was shocked, feeling a surge through her body. At that point, the officers at the scene kept people away from Lane until an Emergency Medical Service ambulance arrived.
“The officer tried to help her and she got electrocuted — that’s when we knew we obviously had a very unsafe condition, and the last thing we wanted to do was for more people to suffer any casualties,” McCarthy said.
“I don’t even know if she checked the pulse,” McCarthy said. “I think just standing close to her, not touching her at all, I think the officer was electrocuted. I don’t even know if that’s possible,” he said. “As far as I’m concerned the officer is a hero for trying to do something for the victim.”
McCarthy figures he arrived at the scene no more than 15 minutes after the call came in, as Lane was being put into the ambulance.
McCarthy said he immediately noticed some signs when he first arrived that it had been an electrocution.
“You could see the way someone was carrying the dogs off,” he recalled. “I thought, ‘It wasn’t really a dog fight.’ The dogs’ hair was kind of standing on end. That’s when I thought, ‘Did these dogs get electrocuted?’ ”
He ordered E. 11th St. to be closed off.
“We didn’t know the extent — was it that little grating that you couldn’t even see that was covered with ice and water? Was it the whole block?” McCarthy said. “I didn’t know how many of these plates there are on the street. My biggest concern was that nobody else got zapped. So we got everyone off the street and onto the avenues.”
Asked if Lane was responding or conscious at the scene, the deputy inspector said, “As far as I know, she wasn’t conscious. The first responders got there and they were over the radio pretty fast that they had an unconscious — ‘Put a rush on the bus.’ So, I’m assuming she was probably unconscious pretty fast” after falling on the plate.
Lane was pronounced dead on arrival at Beth Israel Hospital. McCarthy followed the ambulance to the hospital, where he tried to offer support to Lane’s boyfriend after the doctor broke the news.
While at Beth Israel, McCarthy received a call informing him the injured female officer was at Bellevue Hospital, which, he said, was when he first learned she had been shocked.
The young female officer who was shocked was held overnight for observation at Bellevue. McCarthy said she has been put on light duty — the shock caused her to have an irregular heartbeat, and her condition is being monitored.
One witness, Eric Miranda, who was at the scene towards the end of the incident, contends he and several other witnesses never saw officers try to assist Lane. However, Jacob King, the cashier at Veniero’s pastry shop, said he saw officers try to take her pulse.
“I was up in Bellevue that night,” McCarthy said. “Police Commissioner Kelly was up in Bellevue the next day visiting the officer.”
Miranda, a dog-walker who spoke to Lane just before the incident, charges police blocked him from trying to help Lane, threatening to “collar” him if he went near her. Miranda has blasted the officers for failing to get Lane off the charged plate, allowing her to continue to be electrocuted until the ambulance arrived, at which point she was in cardiac arrest.
Asked if police should have known how to respond better to the situation, if they could have somehow gotten Lane off the cover quickly, possibly increasing her chances of survival, McCarthy reiterated officers were dealing with a confused situation and, using a sports phrase, that people are now “playing Monday morning quarterback.”
“You can play Monday morning quarterback on what we should have done,” he said. “The bottom line is that we had an unsafe condition that we didn’t know what exactly we had.
“We didn’t know the extent of the voltage,” he continued. “Is it possible if we took a stretcher or something and hit her with it and got her off…? Again, I could play Monday morning quarterback and think of a million what-ifs we could have done. There’s a lot of things that we didn’t know, a lot of important factors: What was the extent of this box? How big was it? Was it the whole block?”
Asked about Miranda’s claim that he was told by another witness, a woman named Ann, that she saw a female police officer ask if anyone had a mirror to check if Lane was still breathing, McCarthy said, “I never heard that story.”
McCarthy said it was only when, after he returned to the scene from the hospital and Con Ed had shown up to fix the service box, that he understood the problem was confined to that spot.
“That was the first time I realized it was only a small area, just like a little manhole cover,” he said. “None of us are electricians.”
Last week The Villager reported the Police Academy does not teach cadets how to respond to electrocution incidents.
“It’s nothing that I’ve experienced, to be honest with you, in my 20 years in the Police Department. It’s nothing that I want to experience again,” McCarthy said. “It was a tragic, tragic accident.”
It’s still unclear exactly why Lane was electrocuted.
“The way some people explained it, maybe, because of her standing on that [plate], maybe she was tying the dogs up and she touched either the parking meter or there was a metal strip on the curb — but that’s just speculating,” McCarthy said.
In the weeks following Lane’s death, daily newspapers uncovered several more lethal “hot spots” in the East Village. Last week Con Ed released the results so far of its own ongoing investigation: With inspections completed on 75 percent of its 250,000 manholes and service boxes in the city and Westchester, 110 voltage-leaking hot spots — including manholes, junction boxes and lampposts, one near Cooper Union — were found and repaired.
“It’s a major concern,” McCarthy said of the hot spots. “It’s something that they obviously have to correct and correct fast. It’s something that I don’t want to see happen in the East Village again.”
The C.O. noted police routinely see violence on the job, but Lane’s death was different.
“You respond to a lot of instances of shots fired, you find out later that these people have a very bad criminal history,” he said. “You can swallow that a lot better than you can a person like Jodie Lane, who was just a regular person out there innocently walking her dogs…. It’s almost unbelievable.”
McCarthy continues to maintain that the responding officers did the best under the circumstances.
“It’s a split-second thing, you’re going in, you don’t have a lot of factors,” he said. “This was an incident that we really didn’t have any factors. I feel that they had to make a very difficult assessment. And I think they did a very good job in making sure other people weren’t electrocuted.”
Asked about reports Lane’s family plans to sue the Police Department as well as Con Ed over the incident, McCarthy declined comment.
“My heart goes out to the family,” he said. “They’ve obviously been through a lot. In regard to the lawsuit, that really doesn’t have anything to do with me. I’m more concerned that somebody died in my precinct.”
