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House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband was attacked Friday by an intruder at their San Francisco home.
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Police said Paul Pelosi was somehow able to call 911 during the incident.
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The 911 dispatcher knew something was wrong based on what she could overhear and alerted the police.
The San Francisco Police Department confirmed at a news conference Friday night that Paul Pelosi, husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, was somehow able to call 911 before being attacked with a hammer, allowing dispatching to respond.
Police Chief William Scott said when officers arrived, Paul Pelosi and the assailant were standing in the hallway of the house, each holding the hammer.
Confirmation that Paul Pelosi had called 911 came after media reports said he secretly called 911 so the intruder wouldn’t know and spoke in a way that would alert the dispatcher to what was happening without betraying himself. .
Sources told the Los Angeles Times Paul Pelosi told the intruder to go to the bathroom and called 911 after he left, leaving the line open. The Times reported that dispatcher Heather Grimes overheard Paul Pelosi and the intruder talking and notified police.
A source with knowledge of the situation gave a similar report to CNN. John Miller, the outlet’s chief law enforcement and intelligence analyst, said Paul Pelosi somehow secretly called 911 and left the line open. He said that when Coordinator Grimes replied, no one responded to her, but she could hear a background conversation and sensed that something was not right. She turned up the volume to listen in.
“Paul Pelosi is basically trying to tell her in code what’s going on, ‘Why are you here? What are you going to do with me?’ I mean, you can imagine him trying not to let the attacker know that 911 is listening,” Miller said.
Based on what she heard, Grimes called for a high-priority health check at the house, he said. When officers arrived, they saw the men struggle over the hammer before the intruder hit Pelosi with the hammer, according to Miller, who added that it all happened on body-camera footage.
While police have not confirmed details of the 911 call, as reported by CNN and the LA Times, the chief praised Grimes by name for her actions during Friday night’s press conference.
“I would like to emphasize once again and thank our coordinator Heather Grimes for her intuition, for the quick thinking. She had to interpret what she was being told and based on her experience and her intuition, she found that there was more to this incident than what she was told,” Scott said. “Her actions, in my opinion, have resulted in a higher priority dispatch and a faster response from the police.”
The San Francisco Police Department and the Capitol Police Department did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for additional information.
Read the original article on Business Insider
