The call started like so many others.
A mom who had been arguing with her teenage son, called 911 because the 18-year-old had been drinking alcohol and was out of control.
Unfortunately, there was nothing unusual about the call at first, said Heath Brant, Johnson County’s 911 director.
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Click here to purchase photos from this galleryA couple minutes in, the call took a turn when the man grabbed a knife from the kitchen, confined his mom and her boyfriend to a bedroom in their trailer and threatened to kill them.
Kaitlynn Rhude listened as it all played out on the other end of the line.
Moments later, the 25-year-old 911 dispatcher asked if she could talk to the man she could hear spewing threats in the background, and calmed him down in the 13 minutes it took sheriff’s deputies to arrive at the Center Grove area home.
Her quick thinking during that call ultimately saved three lives. For her actions, Rhude recently received a national award that only two dispatchers in the country receive each month.
A calling
Growing up, Rhude dreamed of becoming a detective. She still does, she said in between calls while sitting at her four-monitor desk inside Johnson County’s dark public safety communications center.
It is in her blood, she said. She got a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice and a master’s degree in forensic psychology so she could spend her life helping people.
For now, she’s happy where she’s at, she said. Rhude has experience in a couple different areas of public safety, and has plans to dabble in others.
Having a breadth of knowledge will come in handy someday when she puts on that detective hat and helps solve the crimes she only hears bits and pieces of now, rarely knowing the end result.
“Closure isn’t something we get a lot of the time,” she said.
Dispatch receives about 500 calls a day. Rhude, on any given shift, could be responsible for 75 to 100 of them. She’s been a dispatcher for about three years now. Before that, she worked at the county’s Juvenile Detention Center for five years.
The call
On the evening of Dec. 19, 2018, Rhude had just clocked in for a long night shift when she took a call from a Johnson County woman who said her “kid” was drinking, not listening and destroying her house.
The recording of the call showed the extent Rhude went to to calm the suspect down.
Rhude asked a few basic questions. The woman answered them. Then Rhude broke away for a moment to dispatch police to the Center Grove area address.
Not long after Rhude returned to the call, the woman said, “You put that knife up.”
“Ma’am, does he have a knife?” Rhude asked repeatedly until the caller finally answered.
“Yeah, he’s got a knife,” the caller said, calmly.
Rhude encouraged the woman to distance herself from the suspect by going into another room and locking the door or stepping outside. The caller told Rhude she can’t because the suspect was blocking her and her boyfriend from leaving, and he’d just follow them anyway.
The suspect could be heard shouting in the background.
“I’m going to do time-time,” he said, repeatedly. “I’m about to do life.”
That’s when Rhude asked to talk to the young man, which the caller reluctantly agreed to.
The suspect took the phone, told Rhude he’s never been to jail, but he’s going to jail for life, for murder, and slammed the phone down.
Rhude got him back on the phone and immediately started talking to him.
“Don’t do that, bud. You’re only 18,” Rhude said. “Calm down for me. You don’t need to go to jail.”
That didn’t work, so she started asking questions.
“What did your mom do to you? Just tell me what she did,” Rhude said.
The threats continued.
Without missing a beat, Rhude switched gears to tell officers what’s happening and encouraged them to speed up their response. That break was barely noticed in the call.
“If y’all come, I’m going to do something,” the suspect said.
Rhude then tried a different approach. She told him she’s not on her way and that she’s just a dispatcher, so he can talk to her.
“Just put down the knife, OK? They can’t take you to jail over nothing. If you put down the knife, nothing will happen,” Rhude said.
He started to calm down, so Rhude changed topics.
“What did you drink today?” she asked him.
“Can you let them outside? Can you let them get by you?”
The suspect allowed his mom and her boyfriend to step away from him.
“I feel like you’ve calmed down a little bit,” Rhude said.
“Yeah, a little bit,” he responded.
“Just because she’s talking to me, I ain’t going to do (anything),” the suspect told his mom and her boyfriend.
He handed them the knife.
Moments later, police arrived.
“Get down on the ground,” officers are heard shouting repeatedly in the background, each time their orders getting closer and closer to the phone.
“Yes, sir,” the suspect said.
And the call ended.
An ‘exceptional’ dispatcher
A dispatcher’s job is mentally taxing, Brant said. Statistics show that 911 dispatchers have post traumatic stress disorder at rates similar to police officers and firefighters. Dispatchers can step away from the phones, retreat to a rest lounge to regroup after a difficult call or now, thanks to a partnership with the Johnson County Animal Shelter, take the center’s foster dog for a walk, he said.
But difficult calls are just part of a job that she signed up for, Rhude said. After that call ended, she was ready for another.
A 13-minute call is rare, Brant said. Most calls are no longer than a few minutes. But this one was during a shift change for officers, and came in at a time when they were already working several other runs.
“Typically, any good dispatcher is going to keep mom on the phone and tell dispatchers what’s going on. But Kaitlynn did what any exceptional dispatcher does. Knowing that the officers were several minutes away, Kaitlynn took action,” Brant said. “Kaitlynn saved three lives that night.”
The officers who arrived on scene and arrested the suspect said that he told them if it wasn’t for Rhude talking to him on the phone, he would have killed his family, Brant said.
“Words can’t describe what was going through my mind. It’s an adrenaline rush,” Rhude said.
She remembers thinking if she could just get him on the phone and expose him to a new voice, maybe he would focus on that instead. Her experience working with juvenile delinquents at the justice center coupled with the psychology classes she took in graduate school helped, she said.
She knew she needed to isolate the suspect from his mom, who was making the situation worse by arguing with him, Rhude said.
Thank God it ended the way it did, she said months later.
“I hate to take credit because anybody out there could have taken that call,” Rhude said from Brant’s office. “But I truly believe that certain calls go to certain dispatchers for a reason.”
Brant and another dispatcher nominated Rhude for a prestigious award thinking it was a long shot, he said, and Rhude was selected.
“It’s very humbling to know that we have one of the best dispatchers in the country in good ol’ Johnson County. That’s pretty special,” Brant said.
He presented the Teammates in Action Award from the Association of Public Safety Communicators to Rhude during a recent Johnson County Board of Commissioners meeting. The award focuses on isolated incidents instead of a portfolio of work.
Brant wanted the award to be a surprise, so he didn’t tell Rhude why he wanted her to attend the commissioners meeting.
“I thought I was getting fired,” Rhude said, laughing. “Once I realized why I was there, I thought, ‘Well, isn’t this neat?’ It’s very humbling. It made me feel important and valued. Sadly, (dispatchers) are considered secretaries in the eyes of the law.”
