‘I think she is inhuman. She has no human feeling. She doesn’t have any.’ — Bereft mom Cynthia Rennix on EMT dispatcher Melissa Jackson, who refused to assist a dying Eutisha Rennix (above)
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The Brooklyn EMT who, while on a break, refused to directly aid a dying pregnant woman was cleared yesterday when official-misconduct charges were dropped — then callously insisted she wouldn’t change a thing about that fateful day.
Melissa Jackson, 27, was in uniform and on-duty when she took a break from her dispatcher shift at FDNY headquarters in Downtown Brooklyn in December 2009 to meet her fellow-EMT boyfriend in a nearby Au Bon Pain.
Inside the eatery, employee Eutisha Rennix, 25, suffered a serious asthma attack. But despite pleas from her co-workers for help, Jackson wouldn’t walk into the back room to assess her condition, prosecutors said.
Instead, she called EMS dispatch from her cellphone to report the incident, and was heard laughing repeatedly as she told the dispatcher her name should be left off the report, according to authorities. Rennix and her unborn child died.
Frustrated Brooklyn prosecutors were forced to dismiss the charge after EMS chief Abdo Nahmod last week flip-flopped on his position that she had violated a departmental rule requiring on-duty EMTs to treat a person in distress and notify dispatch if asked for help.
“Based on the reversal of . . . Chief Nahmod, there is absolutely no possible way to sustain a criminal charge against Ms. Jackson,” Brooklyn prosecutor Kevin Richardson said in court.
“We’re perplexed. We don’t know why he changed his mind,” a law-enforcement source said of Nahmod.
Outside court, Jackson refused to apologize or accept any responsibility, saying she would do the same thing again.
“If the same thing happened again, and I worked inside a 911 dispatch center, I would call 911 to have an ambulance dispatched to the location so they would be able to render care,” Jackson said.
That didn’t sit well with Rennix’s mother.
“I think she is inhuman. She has no human feeling. Where is her compassion? She doesn’t have any,” Cynthia Rennix said of Jackson.
The Rennix family has a pending lawsuit against Jackson and the FDNY.
“The justice that [Cynthia Rennix] failed to get in the criminal side of our justice system, she will now get in the civil side,” vowed family attorney Sanford Rubenstein.