News 12 at 11 o'clock, November 12,2009

AUGUSTA---62-year-old Paul Whitehead, an otherwise healthy adult education teacher, showed up to teach a morning class on October 6 and then collapsed into a coma.

Whitehead has been in the hospital ever since, but his wife believe there's missing details before the incident happened. Whitehead's family turned to New 12 to help find out more.

What's in question is the time that Whitehead collapsed. While it only took EMS workers four minutes to arrive at the Bon Air Hotel where the off-site class was held, Nancy Whitehead believes someone should have called them sooner than when the call was allegedly made.

"It's devastating, just devastating," says Whitehead. "He gave his puppy a pat on the head that morning and gave him some food and then he said to me I'm gone."

Whitehead remembers the last day her husband was able to speak to her. She says he followed his routine schedule of getting dressed and breakfast and then he left. She says he left early that day because he had to pick up books before the class. His classes usually started at 10am.

"Shortly after arriving there he fell," says Terry Elam, Augusta Technical College president. "Statements that I read from students is that he hit his head, then they called 911 and notified the authorities at Bon Air."

"They don't expect him to ever gain enough consciousness to be aware of his surroundings at all," says Nancy Whitehead.

That's a bitter pill for the wife of 34 years to swallow. She believes help should have arrived faster. When she picked up a copy of the EMS report, she was disturbed by the details.

The report says that it was 25 minutes, according to a report from the students and six instructors who were present when my husband went down," says Whitehead.

"You call EMS first, and then you notify the school. That's the way it happened," Elam said. "We were notified by the property managers at Bon Air."

According to a witness in the EMS report, Mr. Whitehead's seizure lasted for 25 minutes before EMS was called.

School officials also say they're concerned:

"There appears to be some gaps as to whether there were delays or not," says Elam. "Because of the conflicting reports, we are going to do an additional investigation."

"I think the students just panicked, and I do believe that the students ran to get help, I honestly believe that they ran to get help," says Whitehead. "But I feel like if they had called immediately, I think that the EMTs would have gotten there immediately, and I don't think he would have sustained as much damage."

Elam also offers his sympathies on behalf of the school: "We're very saddened by his sudden illness. We're hoping that he'll have some recovery."

Mrs. Whitehead says she knows her husband's condition is bleak, but she hasn't given up on him and hasn't given up on finding out more details of what happened that day.

"(He) would give them the shirt off his back. We're the type of people, we don't even bypass a hit dog on the street. We're just those type of people. So for someone to let him lay there like that, there's no word for it," says Whitehead.

Whitehead says she is not looking to point blame, but she wants to find out what really happened. According to the report it took four minutes for the EMS crew to arrive, but the discrepancy is the time when the seizure happened.

Mr. Elam says Augusta Technical College is also conducting its own investigation. According to Mr. Elam the school initially only talked to three students about the incident, but they are planning to meet with the whole class next week to see if they can get a better timeline of the events.