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While emergency crews were converging on Goshen Thursday afternoon, a dispatcher at the Kosciusko County Central Dispatch Center was trying to keep the father of one of the shooting victims calm.
Sheryl Cripe was the first person shot, according to information received from her father, Dave Cripe. Mr. Cripe was talking to his daughter, who called him from inside the Nu-Wood Decorative Millwork plant in Goshen, where a disgruntled employee allegedly came into the business and began shooting.
Cripe was reportedly shot in the arm and the hip and could not move. She was sitting in a chair inside one of two trailers used as offices in the building. Another man in the office with her was reportedly shot in the face.
Kosciusko County dispatcher Heather Zentz received a cellular 911 call from Dave Cripe at 4:03 p.m. She remained on the line with him for 35 minutes until the battery of his cellular telephone went dead, then called him back at another cellular number.
"It was quite a long conversation," said Tom Brindle, director of the local dispatch center. Brindle said it is not uncommon to receive a 911 call from out of the jurisdiction of local police when the call is made on a cellular telephone.
While Zentz was working to reassure Cripe, another dispatcher, Jodi Rowland, relayed information being received by Zentz to authorities in Elkhart County.
Both women did an excellent job, Brindle said, of keeping the situation under control. Zentz has been a dispatcher at the center since October and previously worked 7-1/2 years as an Indiana State Police dispatcher. Rowland has been a dispatcher in Kosciusko County since 1996.
"He (Mr. Cripe) was very upset and she (Zentz) did her best to keep him calm," Brindle said. "He didn't know why the police didn't go in ... and his daughter was bleeding to death. He was extremely upset and agitated."
With the Cripes and the Kosciusko County dispatchers working together, Sheryl Cripe was able to provide police with the name and a description of the suspected shooter and to provide some updates of what was going on inside the plant. She could not see where Robert Wissman was during the interval between the time she was shot and the time police entered the building.
"She had no idea where he was in the building," Brindle said, but she did hear someone trying to get into the door of the office sometime after she was shot. It was not known whether the door was locked at that time, but it is believed that the police were in the building by then and that it was an officer checking the area who rattled the door.
Ambulances from Multi-Township, North Webster/Tippecanoe Township, Milford, Plain and Syracuse emergency medical services were dispatched to the scene and all ambulances in Kosciusko County were placed on standby for Goshen.
The ambulances joined many others in a staging area in the industrial park, but the local services were not needed. The original call regarding the matter came to the dispatch center from Elkhart County as a "mass casualty," with as many as 30 to 35 people injured. The final count of injured employees was six, with two people, including the shooter, reported dead.
