AUGUSTA – Often, first responders work with very little recognition. If you didn’t know a dispatcher personally, you may not ever know that someone does it for a living. One woman’s behind-the-scenes work brought her into the spotlight.
“We are humans. We’re mothers, we’re fathers, we’re sisters, we’re home owners, when your house is on fire, we understand and empathize with every single one of these calls that comes in,” said Cpl. Jessica Nguyen, a 911 dispatcher for Richmond County.
Nguyen started her job 11 years ago, ready for anything but still not sure what to expect from her new career.
“I saw a lot of growth, a lot of potential in Jessica,” said Sanita Cheatham, Nguyen’s friend and supervisor at the dispatch center. “I saw here nurturing nature, and I saw that potential and know that she can do anything she puts her mind to.”
But in the last few years, she seems to have hit her stride and found her calling.
“Multi-tasking was just something tremendous effort that I had to learn, typing, talking, listening, not only to our first responders on the radio, but also our callers and our peers simultaneously,” said Nguyen, as she looked back on her first days on the job.
On a typical shift, Nguyen starts at 5:30 p.m., and wraps at 6:30 a.m. She’s handled a lot of chaotic calls during that time, including one that left even her shocked.
“The address was hard to get out of the caller. I had call back, I had to use the resources that we had here at the 911 center, mapping, re-transmitting, to try to verify the location,” said Nguyen. “I was initially hung up on and I had to call back to see what happened. And it turned out that it was a juvenile that had been shot and killed.”
But despite the literal hang-ups, she kept working until she got the information she needed. Afterwards, she and her teammates took some time to decompress.
“It did make me pause,” said Nguyen. “And my teammates were immediately there for me, and they knew that I needed a moment and I needed a break, and they were there, immediately for me.”
That night stood out to her supervisors. It was a big reason she won the department’s award for first responder of the year.
“Me personally, I don’t look for recognition,” said Nguyen. “That’s one of the things I kind of hide from. My line of work helps with that, because people don’t normally think about us, but to be nominated is an amazing feeling and I’m very thankful for it.”
“This is one time that I had to nominate her because she’s done so many tremendous things with handling calls, with being a mother and having a husband on the sheriff’s department, that there are people out there who understand what she’s going through,” said Cheatham.
In addition to the teenager’s death, Nguyen has handled several other difficult calls as a dispatcher. That includes an electrocution and an officer-involved shooting. For her work, she was recently promoted to corporal.
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