BY ROD HANSEN
A local family has complained a member of the town’s rescue service interrogated their daughter and threatened to insert an intravenous needle against the teenager’s will during an incident last Christmas Day.
An ambulance driver also forced Jill Pepelis to step out of the vehicle a half mile away the family’s Fieldstone Circle home as they transported her daughter to Concord Hospital, Pepelis wrote in a letter to The Goffstown News.
Pepelis attributed several “inappropriate and unprofessional” actions during the incident to Weare firefighter Newell Bailey, who is a captain with the department’s EMS services.
The alleged incident occurred on the evening of Dec. 25, 2006, when Pepelis’s 18-year-old daughter, Abby, suffered an apparent seizure after taking some prescription cough medicine.
Weare rescue employee Annmary Dinsmore arrived at the Pepelis home in response to a 911 call. After taking Abby’s vital signs and learning the teenager had taken cough medicine, Dinsmore said the seizure was likely a reaction to the medication, Pepelis wrote.
Bailey arrived at the Pepelis home later, and asked Abby many of the same questions Dinsmore had already asked, her mother wrote. When Abby’s father, Gary Pepelis, attempted to help her get on a stretcher for transportation to Concord Hospital, Bailey allegedly said, “I am in charge here,” according to Pepelis’s letter.
During the ambulance ride to the hospital, Pepelis said Bailey asked her daughter if she was on drugs or alcohol. He also asked if she fought with her parents or her boyfriend, and if she always cried when she got sick.
“He was stripping me and my daughter of our dignity with the relentless unnecessary questions that had no relevance or need … He has no respect for a patient’s rights, no concept of professionalism and no regard for the emotional trauma he created for the patient,” Pepelis wrote in her letter.
The ambulance ultimately pulled over and dropped Jill Pepelis on the side of the road per Bailey’s orders, Pepelis wrote. She and Gary followed the ambulance to Concord Hospital, where a doctor confirmed that Abby had suffered a reaction to the cough medication.
The incident prompted Pepelis to write a letter to Town Administrator Fred Ventresco regarding Bailey’s treatment of Abby. Ventresco responded that it was a personnel issue to be handled by the Board of Fire Wards, Pepelis said.
Ventresco confirmed that he had sent a letter to Pepelis, and explained why the incident qualified as a personnel issue.
“The way I understand it, if you’re going to bring up anything discussing the performance of an employee, it’s standard to address that in nonpublic session,” Ventresco said.
Board of Fire Wards Chairman Bill Tiffany verified that Bailey is a paid call employee of the town’s fire rescue service, and confirmed that Bailey was the supervisor on the call to the Pepelis house.
The New Hampshire Bureau of Emergency Medical Services has reviewed the case, and Tiffany said the Board of Fire Wards is ready to issue a decision on the matter.
Tiffany would not address specifics of the case, but said the Board of Fire Wards would likely consider the matter at their meeting of May 14 in nonpublic session.
Reached at the Fire Department, Bailey also declined to discuss the case.