police were finally sent. But by then it was too late. The young Eddie Polec lay bloodied and unconscious on the steps of a church where just a few short years before he had served as an altar boy. He was immediately rushed to a hospital. But the following morning, after a full night of intensive medical emergency treatment had failed, Eddie Polec was pronounced dead. As the news of his death broke, it would later come out that while Eddie Polec's friends gathered in mourning outside the church where he had been killed the night before, four teenage girls from Abington who had been part of the caravan the night before attended a party for a friend just a few blocks away from the church, by all accounts totally unfazed by it. News coverage The news coverage of Eddie Polec's murder quickly went national, with the failure on the part of Philadelphia's 911 operators receiving special emphasis, much of the blame being placed directly on them. Fox Chase residents and others had complained about them being insensitive and unresponsive, and even expressing resentment as the callers tried to make clear the matter's urgency. The head of the union representing the operators stated that the reason for their questionable performance was because they had been working with outdated equipment, were underpaid, and had not been trained properly by the city. Nonetheless, Philadelphia's Mayor Ed Rendell took immediate disciplinary action against them, saying, "Flaws in the system in no way, shape or form give anybody license to be abusive to citizens calling to report a crime." In their own defense the operators soon after appeared on ABC's The Oprah Winfrey Show, where they tried to argue that they had done a good job that night. But 911 tapes that had been released by the police and that were getting extensive airplay nationally by that point only confirmed the callers' accusations. The 911 operators themselves, meantime, believed that because they were all African American they were being made political scapegoats. But that claim was denounced by the president of Philadelphia's branch of the NAACP, Thornhill Cosby, who said: "This is not a racial issue. It is a human issue." The 911 workers appealed the city's disciplinary action and were eventually exonerated. The mayor, meantime, created a commission to explore ways the 911 system could be improved upon The investigation of Eddie Polec's