Dispatcher Answers 911 McDonald’s Robbery Call, Realizes It’s Her Daughter

A woman had been helping with answering calls at an emergency dispatch center in New Orleans last month when she suddenly heard her 16-year-old daughter on the other line, WDSU reports. 

“Mama, please hurry up she’s got a gun,” Tenia Hill told her mother Teri Clark. Hill was working at a McDonald’s when an armed robber came inside, and forced her and her co-workers in the freezer. “We are going to hurry, give me a description,” Clark responded. 

“I was in a state of shock,” Clark, an assistant operations manager at the Orleans Parish Communications District, told WDSU. She decided to stay late and take calls when Tenia called. “What broke me down was when my child said, ‘We’re in the freezer.’ And I said, ‘The freezer?’ … While I was taking the call, tears coming down my face, but I am still trying to do my job,” she recalled. 

Clark managed to remain calm throughout their interaction, and relay the necessary information to the New Orleans Police Department. Hill and her fellow employees were found safe and sound in the freezer when officers arrived at the scene. 

“I was really scared because I would never imagined at my first job I would be getting robbed let alone having a gun pointed at me,” Hill said of the incident. “I was very worried because I didn’t want my mom to have to bury her youngest child. I could have lost my life, but she saved my life. I was very happy.”