code 5

Here I am, sitting at work having a pretty boring day. We've been a little 911 heavy but nothing too bad. I don't think I've taken an actual 911 call today, maybe one, not really sure. I wasn't feeling so good earlier tonight but it has since passed. Well the quietness and routineness of it all just got shattered. I recieved a call from a local city EMS agency requesting we make scene at an area in their city but our county. So I took the call and we got a unit en route. All of a sudden three more 911 calls came in from that area. So we were a little busy and a bit stretched. When EMS talked to me they just said it was an unknown man down in a park, possibly having seizures. It sounded pretty benign so we sent our crew in counting on them to use their best judgement. Shortly afterward admist all the 911 traffic we recieved a short transmission, "Unit x needs SO NOW." And our crew sounded quite freaked out, something not normal for him. So I immediately called SO and made sure they were enroute. The dispatcher tried contacting the crew with no reply, we tried to reach them a lot and they would not respond. Needless to say, we freaked out....more to come later...
Anways...it pretty much set things into a tizzy up in dispatch. I was on the line with SO trying to find out how much longer until a unit made scene at the location, and trying to explain to the lady on the phone that we really really needed them there right this second. Another person was on the phone with our supervisor who was also on his way to location. We had to move all of the traffic to the backup channel on our radios and had a second unit en route to the scene in case our guys needed mroe help. 20 long minutes later they called out that they were transporting code three. No explanation of what happened. Well things slowly made their way back to normal. We cancelled the extra units and SO and moved everyone back. Of course everyone wanted to know what was going on, code 5 is not called very often at all.
We found out right before I left what had happened. Apparently when the unit pulled up on scene they found the pt down with a belt around his neck. So they thought it was a crime scene and needed SO to make location. Apparently their handheld radio didn't have good reception where they were located at so they didn't hear us over the radio. But we did send multiple pages to their truck's pager and personal pagers and they never got in contact so our supervisor for the evening made the call to put out a code 5 until we knew for sure what was going on.
From a dispatch standpoint, it was kinda terrifying. To know that we had a unit out who was potentially in great danger, and there was nothing we could do from where we were. Personally, I took the call and had made a bad assumption that there wasn't anything to worry about at this scene. But, lesson learned, and experience to check off the list. I'll be ok if we don't have to do that again.