A man suffering a heart attack died Sunday hours after District firefighters stopped at the wrong location and returned to their station in Northeast Washington, delaying treatment of the man by at least 20 minutes, according to relatives and a fire department spokesman.
Albert Jackson, 67, was pronounced dead at a Prince George’s County hospital shortly after he arrived by a D.C. ambulance, said his wife, Gloria Jackson, 65. In an interview Tuesday night, Jackson said she doesn’t know whether a faster response would have saved her husband.
“We tried to revive him here,” she said of efforts she and her grandson made to administer CPR while waiting for help for her husband. “They tried to revive him at the hospital. I don’t know if getting him there faster would have made a difference or not.”
Albert Jackson was a retired construction foreman who is also survived by three grown children, four other grandchildren and a great-grandchild. The incident, first reported by Fox-5 news, is the latest in a long series of errors and delays in emergency response by the D.C. fire department, although such instances have been fewer under the District’s new administration, which just concluded its first year.