[4/28/04]Electronic information from a cell phone showed a caller from what turned out to be a fatal wreck Tuesday morning was near Edwards, but authorities were given little else to go on in locating him.

“He kept saying he was on Highway 80 and Bovina Cut-Off (Road), but they didn’t cross,” said April Comans, the Warren County E-911 dispatcher who took the call from George Davis, 42.

Davis was injured and disoriented and said he was inside a wrecked car with another man he described as unconscious. He dialed 911 from a cell phone at 9:34 a.m., but he told Comans he thought the wreck may have happened during the night, she said.

During the search Davis told dispatchers he wasn’t sure of his location because he had been asleep at the time of the wreck.

Comans and Davis remained in near-continuous conversation as five 911 Center staffers and about 12 law-enforcement officers searched for him for about an hour.

“You should have been here,” when the report came over the radio that deputies Todd Dykes and John Roland had located Davis at the wreck site, in a deep ravine that passes under U.S. 80 just west of the Big Black River, said Peggy Wright, dispatch supervisor. “You should’ve heard the cheering in the room when we finally located him. That’s what you work for.”

Wright, who was off duty but happened to be in the center when the call came in, helped relay to fellow dispatchers Eddie Hollowell and Cindy Alkhatib information Comans was receiving from Davis.

Center director Allen Maxwell was also helping coordinate the operation. The last call of such length E-911 staff could remember had happened at least a year earlier.

“They’re normally very quick,” Maxwell said of typical calls.

Comans’ co-workers also handled the duties she normally would have had during that time.

“I just kept assuring him that we’ve got everybody looking for him,” Comans said.

At one point during the call, Comans realized that she and Davis were acquainted from a previous job. Since Davis was “getting aggravated” with answering all the questions he was being asked, Comans asked her supervisor, Wright, if she could make an exception to E-911 policy and identify herself to Davis.

Wright agreed, and the tactic worked, Comans said.

“He actually calmed down,” she said, adding that with the additional trust of a personal relationship, “He was answering everything.”

“At one time he told us that he heard a train,” Maxwell said. “That helped us to try to isolate his location.”

Davis also provided dispatchers with the phone number of his girlfriend’s home, from which he said the two men were traveling to Delta when they wrecked. Locating that home helped staff make a more-educated guess of the route the vehicle might have taken.

Hollowell had ambulance and rescue units from the Vicksburg Fire Department deploy to a staging area until deputies, using Davis’ reporting to E-911 when he could hear their coordinated siren blasts, located him.

“He helped us and he helped himself an awful lot,” Maxwell said.

Maxwell said the call showed great cooperation among all involved and the value of preparedness.

“It was a regular Tuesday morning, like any other,” he said, adding that the search began “all of a sudden, out of nowhere.”