Dispatcher Amber Smith: Kyle Plush’s 911 Call and $6M Settlement

Amber Smith is the Cincinnati 911 dispatcher who took Kyle Plush’s second 911 call on April 10, 2018, and never sent help. The 16-year-old was suffocating inside his family’s Honda Odyssey in a school parking lot when he reached her; he gave his location, his vehicle, and told her he was almost dead. Smith activated a teletypewriter function meant for hearing-impaired callers, later said she could not hear him clearly, and ended the call without logging it in the dispatch system or relaying anything to the officers who were still nearby. Plush’s father found his body in the van roughly six hours later.¹²

What Happened on Smith’s Call

Plush’s second call came in around 3:35 p.m., about twenty minutes after his first. He was specific this time: “I’m trapped inside my gold Honda Odyssey van in the sophomore parking lot of Seven Hills. This is not a joke.” He said, “I’m almost dead,” and asked the call-taker to tell his mother he loved her if he died.¹

Smith was working out of a backup facility while the main Emergency Communications Center was being renovated. Call-takers were seated at temporary tables in a space with construction noise in the background.³ When Smith apparently could not hear Plush clearly, she engaged the center’s TTY function, a tool for hearing-impaired callers that staff had been told to use on silent calls. Turning it on cut the caller’s audio by 75 percent. An Ohio appeals court later found Smith had not been adequately trained on how to disengage the TTY once activated, and that she did not play back the recording of the call at a higher volume.⁴

Smith told supervisors she heard what she interpreted as a woman saying “Siri, Siri” and could not make out anything else. She said her computer screen froze as she tried to enter information about the call.⁵⁶⁷

How Her Performance Was Rated

An internal review scored Smith’s call at 60 percent, rated “unacceptable.” Reviewers wrote that “active listening” was “not attempted” and raised questions about whether she had been at her station with her headset on. She received passing marks only for her greeting and tone of voice. Investigators could not confirm whether her headset was malfunctioning, though they found it had worked properly on dozens of calls before and after Plush’s.⁸ The dispatcher on Plush’s first call, Stephanie Magee, was scored at 90 percent and rated “acceptable” despite her own failure to relay key details to responding officers.⁹

Police Chief Eliot Isaac said publicly that “both technical problems and human error may be to blame” for the failed response.⁸

Leave, Return to Work, and No Criminal Charges

Cincinnati police placed Smith on administrative leave shortly after Plush’s death. A department source told reporters that a one-week leave was customary for dispatchers involved in incidents resulting in a death.⁸ Within days the department announced she would return to work the following Wednesday, even though the internal investigation was still open. Police spokeswoman Tiffaney Hardy said she could not confirm whether Smith would face formal discipline while the inquiry continued.¹⁰

In November 2018, Hamilton County Prosecutor Joseph Deters announced that no criminal charges would be filed against anyone involved in the case.¹¹

The Wrongful Death Lawsuit Against Smith

In 2019, Kyle Plush’s parents filed a wrongful death lawsuit naming the City of Cincinnati and five individuals: Smith, Magee, Officers Osborn and Brazile, and former city manager Harry Black. The complaint tied Smith’s handling of the call to systemic failures at the 911 center, including inadequate training and staffing.¹²

The city moved to dismiss on governmental immunity grounds. A Hamilton County Common Pleas judge ruled in January 2020 that the case could go forward. On appeal, the Ohio First District Court of Appeals split the question on December 16, 2020. The court held that the City of Cincinnati and its employees acting in their official capacities were shielded by immunity because the incident happened on private property rather than city land. But it allowed the case to proceed against all five individuals in their personal capacities, finding that the complaint “sufficiently alleges at least reckless conduct to preclude immunity.”⁴

That ruling left Smith exposed to personal liability. The reckless-conduct finding was tied to the specific facts of her call: the TTY activation she could not reverse, her failure to replay the audio at higher volume, and her failure to document the call or relay Plush’s information to nearby officers.⁴

The $6 Million Settlement

On April 9, 2021, the Plush family and the City of Cincinnati announced a $6 million settlement. All five individual defendants, Smith included, were released from the lawsuit.¹³ Family attorney Al Gerhardstein said the deal was structured to secure enforceable reforms at the Emergency Communications Center, and it included a five-year, court-supervised reform plan and $250,000 for three outside 911 experts to review training, quality assurance, protocols, and retention.¹⁴

Smith’s Record Before the Plush Call

Smith had drawn positive attention roughly a year before Plush’s death. In March 2017, she handled a call from a 9-year-old girl whose parents had both overdosed on heroin in a Jeep. The child had put the vehicle in park before dialing 911. Smith used software to ping the child’s cellphone location, kept her calm on the line, and contacted the girl’s grandmother after responders arrived. Smith, who at that point had three years of experience as a Cincinnati 911 operator, said, “I’m no hero, I just did my job. Each one of us would have done the same thing. That’s what we’re trained to do.”¹⁵

The System Smith Was Working In

Smith’s handling of the call was central to what went wrong, but she was working inside a center that had been visibly deteriorating for years. Between 2014 and 2018, city officials received roughly a dozen memos, reports, and news stories documenting problems at the Emergency Communications Center. As early as January 2014 the center’s director reported 18 vacancies; by 2016, vacancies hovered around 20; ten new operator positions approved by City Council in late 2017 were never filled.¹⁶

An Enquirer investigation counted nine system crashes between June 2016 and July 2017 that together took the 911 system offline for more than seven hours, with the longest single outage running over three hours.¹⁶ At the time of Plush’s death, a single person was responsible for training more than 100 employees.¹⁷ Councilman Chris Seelbach had warned in 2017 that the city was “playing Russian roulette with people’s lives.”

The appeals court’s findings against Smith rested on her own actions on the call. The context around her, chronic understaffing, thin training, unstable equipment, and a temporary work space, is the backdrop against which those actions took place.