Open Letter To B-LMC HR Director Dennis Johnson
From Galen Green; August 2005
Dear Dennis,
Here’s the brief recounting of the events immediately leading up to my firing on the afternoon of Friday, February 25th that you requested.
Please allow me to preface my narrative by reminding you that, during my nine years of delivering an excellent work product as an armed security officer for Health Midwest and HCA, I've been involved in between 50 and 100 situations very similar to the one which took place on the 2/25, and have always received grateful "'at-a-boy's" from my fellow officers, as well as from other hospital staff. Moreover, there is every reason to believe that I'd have received a similar positive response for my performance on 2/25 from any of my colleagues other than Supvr. Ludwig. But in the lawless atmosphere which has been allowed to descend upon B-LMC's security department since Supvr. Ludwig's arrival on January 5th of last year -- whereby black is white, up is down and wrong is right -- it was nothing short of inevitable that Galen Green would be slandered, scapegoated and fired for once again doing an excellent job of following HCA and B-LMC departmental policies and procedures to the letter.
At around 9:30 on the morning of February 25th of this year, our department was called to the Emergency Department to remove a 30-ish B/M (approx. 6'2"; 180 lbs.) who'd been treated and discharged but who refused to leave. At the time, I was patrolling the parking lots in one of our department's two vehicles, but indicated on the radio that I was enroute to the E.D. to assist in removing this recalcitrant individual. Supvr. Ludwig responded on the radio with an abrasive comment regarding my offer for back-up, a comment overheard by and later remarked upon by Rob in Maintenance (whom I strongly urge you to interview), as well as by the PBX operator.
Be that as it may, I remained outside on patrol, per Supvr. Ludwig’s specific instructions, while Officers Ludwig, Ciston and Fennix removed the party in question from the E.D. and escorted him to the bus stop on Rockhill, about 35 steps from the hospital's lobby entrance. Supvr. Ludwig then informed me by radio that the subject was at the bus stop and instructed me to make sure that he did not sneak back into the building.
Having been through similar scenarios, I posted myself in the same location where any and all of the other experienced officers in our department would in similar situations -- in the only spot from which an officer can monitor a subject's movements in any direction from the Rockhill bus stop. After the subject had paced back and forth in a broad swath in front of the bus stop for perhaps seven or eight minutes, he began to walk toward the hospital's lobby entrance, at which point I (who'd been watching him like a hawk, as our department's CCTV videotape clearly would have recorded, had Supvr. Ludwig or anyone else in authority honestly cared to check) followed standard procedure by getting into the patrol vehicle, starting it up and driving as quickly as common sense (vis-a-vis the many pedestrians in the visitors' parking lot) would allow, toward the hospital entrance, to head him off.
When I pulled into the circle drive and rolled down the car window to confront the subject to inform him that he was not going to be allowed back into the building, there was no available space to pull the patrol vehicle out of the heavy traffic flow, so that I could get out of the car to confront him physically. When he asserted that he was, indeed, going to re-enter the hospital (contrary to what he'd been instructed earlier and again by me), I immediately radioed for officer back-up - which is precisely what departmental policy calls for, in such situations.
(Big flashing neon parenthetical footnote, Dennis: It is specifically against departmental policy (and a firing offense if violated) for any officer to physically confront a subject alone (especially when a strong likelihood exists that said confrontation could turn violent – and even more especially when innocent bystanders are involved, as they most certainly were in this instance), if calling for officer back-up obtains as a viable alternative.
To quickly recap: I was watching the subject like a hawk as he paced at the bus stop. The very second he showed signs of walking back toward the hospital, I drove as quickly as was safely possible to the circle drive entrance to head him off. Nine years of armed hospital security experience has taught me that 9 times out of 10, my confronting him as I did (the only way that was available to me at that moment, given the traffic jam in the circle drive that morning) proves sufficient to turn these types of troublemakers around and get them headed off property. But because it had become apparent to me that this individual was going to take advantage of the 10 seconds it was going to take me to drive the patrol vehicle forward to the last curbside parking slot and park it before I could chase him down, I did what every single one of my experienced colleagues would have done in this situation, (And I strongly encourage our panel to interview at least a dozen of them, if any doubt lingers in anyone's mind as to the validity of my position here), and that was to radio for back-up, park the car as quickly as was humanly possible and to run after him.
So . . . just as I was exiting the patrol vehicle and running to catch up with the subject who was entering the hospital lobby through the sliding glass doors, Supvr. Ludwig came running up the side stairs which lead from the circle drive to the ambulance bay -- just in time to pass through the lobby entrance next to me. By this time, the subject had made his way approximately 10 feet into the lobby, when Supvr. Ludwig and I both got in front of him to block his path. I began to address the subject, but Supvr. Ludwig broke in and told him essentially what I was about to tell him -- which is exactly the same thing we in security always tell these people whom we've thrown out of the building. And that is, of course, that they can either turn around and leave immediately or be arrested, cuffed and sent to jail for trespassing. Under much verbal protest, the subject then turned around and allowed Supvr. Ludwig and myself to escort him back out onto the circle drive and in the direction of the bus stop. Supvr. Ludwig then instructed me to move the patrol vehicle out of the circle drive and to meet him down in the dispatch office, which I did.
Perhaps five minutes later, Supvr. Ludwig came charging into dispatch and commenced throwing a temper tantrum like a two-year-old. (I swear, I am not exaggerating here, Dennis!) I'm not even going to attempt to recount for you his exact words, since it's now been nearly six months ago, and since whatever it was he was screaming was completely overshadowed by the shamefully immature nature of his behavior. Myself, having approximately twice as many years of hospital security experience as this out-of-control person making such a fool of himself in my presence (bearing in mind that Ludwig is 20 years younger than me -- young enough to be my son -- and with less than a third of my formal education and a tenth of my corporate experience) heard him out, hoping that he'd have the good sense to calm down and reflect on this outburst of embarrassingly unprofessional childishness.
Even though you may or may not feel that I've taken too many words to recount for you what I consider to have been the reasonably shortest version of this 15-minute series of fateful events on the morning of 2/25/05, let me say in my own defense that my experience thusfar with telling this story to others, over the past six months, has been consistently complicated by my listeners' desire for contextualization. In recounting it for you, therefore, I've done my best to balance a bare-bones narrative with a providing of at least minimal context. The absolutely shortest version would simply have been to say that I was fraudulently fired for doing an excellent job of following policy, but I take it that you were looking for a bit more detail and . . . well, context . . . than that.
I'm not sure of at what point in time you'd like for me to choose to end my account, but end it I will -- at least for the time being. After Supvr. Ludwig threw his outrageously unprofessional tantrum at me in the security dispatch office, he stormed out, and I "went back into service," as we security officers put it.
And, since I knew that I had, indeed, followed policy and performed my duties in this instance in precisely the same way Security Officers Harry Patek, Bob Smith, Neil Stack, Jean Dunham, James Bolton, Dave Eubank, Sonia Fennix, Ray Camerillo, Brian Deaver, Wade Young or Charlie Wagner, for instance, would have done, had they been in my shoes, I thought nothing more of what had just happened -- except for the realization that Supvr. Ludwig's tantrum had obviously been born out of his own lack of experience with such situations on the B-LMC campus and his consequent lack of realistic expectations as to how these situations invariably "go down." (And, yes, I realize that, in saying what I've just said, I'm opening "a whole 'nother can of worms." But I've done so to contextualize, and with the understanding that any discussion of such matters can wait for another day.)
It therefore came to me as a complete surprise (a bolt from out of the blue, an ambush) when, at the end of the shift on 2/25/05, when I was routinely radioing Sonia Fennix with the ending milage on the patrol vehicle I'd been driving, Sonia informed me that I was to "meet Bill in H.R." I think you know the rest. If you don't, please let me know, and I'll fill you in on the actual "conversation" surrounding my firing. As I'm inferring that you already know, it took place in Sue Gilland's office, and the parties present were Corporate Security Director Jim Gnefkow, Campus Supervisor Bill Ludwig, Sue and myself.
I hope that the narrative account I've provided here has not been too terribly far afield from what you'd requested. When I was speaking by phone with one of the security officers at B-LMC this past weekend about an entirely unrelated matter and the subject came up of your having asked me to recount this 15-minute series of events for you (and for the record), the officer with whom I happened to be conversing piped up without my prompting and repeated what I'd been told many times before: "Galen! Everybody in the department knows that the only reason Bill put you on the dayshift was so that he could set you up to be fired!"
Sincerely,
Galen Green
(816) 807-4957
KCMO
August 2005
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