By Jason Sweeney
San Jose Mercury News
HAYWARD, Calif. — When Hayward resident John Triplette felt a little lonely, he would dial 911. Apparently, the unemployed 45-year-old felt lonely quite a bit, making tens of thousands of calls to 911 in the past year.
With the help of Federal Communications Commission employees, Hayward police arrested Triplette about 9:30 p.m. Wednesday after they tracked him to an apartment in the 24000 block of Amador Street.
Triplette faces a maximum of one year in jail on a charge of making annoying calls to 911.
Since Jan. 8, Triplette called the Hayward Communications Center at least 10,000 times, jamming dispatch lines with grunts, bodily noises, beeps from his touch pad or minimal conversation in what sounded to dispatchers like a disguised voice, according to police Lt. Christine Orrey.
“He was severely impacting our communications center,” Orrey said. “He was a lonely man who would call the dispatchers for company, sometimes hundreds of times a day.”
Dispatchers would advise Triplette that he was tying up the line, but to no avail, Orrey said.
Also on Jan. 8, the Hayward Communications Center began taking 911 calls from T-Mobile subscribers, which previously were handled by the California Highway Patrol. The Hayward Police Department is gradually increasing its capacity to take 911 calls from cell phone providers as part of the “E911" system mandated by the FCC, Orrey said.
Immediately after making the switch, Hayward started receiving the strange 911 calls from an unsubscribed T-Mobile number. From Jan. 8 to 14, the communications center received 1,327 calls from the phone number.
Because the number did not have current subscriber information, it couldn’t be tracked to subscriber records, according to Orrey.
“Once we identified that we had a problem, we initiated an investigation,” she said. “We learned that the Highway Patrol, prior to the transfer, had received 17,000 911 calls from the number since May of 2007.”
Investigators also found that Solano County received 4,000 calls from the same number since Jan. 28, she said.
Hayward police subsequently worked with the FCC, which has specialized equipment that can triangulate where a cell phone call is coming from.
On Wednesday, investigators were able to pinpoint the calls to a specific Hayward address.
“They made contact with the residents of the apartment and located the suspect, who was cooperative and apologetic,” Orrey said. “We recovered the phone and arrested him.”
“He completely overwhelmed our system,” Hayward Communications Center manager Desi Calzada said in a news statement. “He delayed the answering of other 911 calls because we were answering his.”
Triplette was cited and released with a March court date.
Copyright 2008 The San Jose Mercury News