We were in the hallway of a housing project, lined up behind apartment 5G, awaiting a callback from the dispatcher. The middle aged neighbor in apartment 5K, which was almost directly across from 5G, opened her door and with wide eyes asked a question, “Is everything alright?”

One of the EMTs answered, “We have an emergency. Would you happen to have a key, or know who would? Your neighbor may be in trouble but we can’t get in.”

The 5K neighbor was apologetic. “I’m sorry, no. She doesn’t really talk to me. She’s a somewhat hateful woman, honestly. I’d go as far as to call her a bitch, if I weren’t raised better. But of course, I don’t wish her any harm. I hope you can get in to help her. I don’t know of anyone who she would trust with a key. I guess that means you’re going to have to break the door down, right? Isn’t that what you do?”

5K was correct and well versed in our procedures. For serious emergencies we would have to gain access when efforts to contact the patient didn’t work out. In this case, the 911 caller had stated she was feeling dizzy and thought she’d pass out. We told our dispatcher that the lobby door had been propped open but there was no answer at the apartment door. The whole procedure takes a long time because we have to wait for the dispatcher to make a few efforts to get in touch with the caller and review the dispatch information for any other way to contact the patient. They do this in between giving out active emergency calls to other units which is truly a nonstop endeavor. When there are no other options left we get the firemen to come and break down the door. Then we would also need PD to secure the apartment until the door can be fixed.

In this case, fire came and destroyed the two locks that held the door closed. When we all went into the apartment there was no patient anywhere. Just another false alarm, right?

About two weeks later we returned again. This time the caller had said she was a friend of the resident and had been on the phone with her when she suddenly stopped talking after complaining of a headache and dizziness. The person feared her friend had passed out…or worse. The dispatcher was able to get in touch with the caller who continued to be frantically worried about her friend but had no way to access the apartment.

Once again the firemen came, broke down two shiny, brand new locks, and once again the apartment was empty. But this time, as we were about to leave, a woman arrived home, surprised to find her apartment full of first responders from several agencies.

“Not again!” she said. She seemed be in her early 40’s and was well dressed with long nails and a trendy hairstyle. We told her the circumstances and she was furious. “Someone is doing this to me out of pure hatred and jealousy.” She said this while giving a big long stare in the direction of apartment 5K. When the police asked her who would have a vendetta against her she mentioned her neighbor specifically. She said that the resident in 5K was jealous of her because her boyfriend had appreciated her style and good looks. She can’t help being more attractive, far more attractive than the woman in 5K, she said. The other woman was just plain jealous even though 5G had done nothing to lead him on in any way. The poor man was probably just tired of being with that awful woman.

“She’s just one of those crazy, jealous girlfriends. Totally irrational, probably has self-esteem issues,” she suggested. She admitted that she had no proof. But there was no one else she could think of who didn’t like her. She asked if the police could trace the phone numbers. They promised to look into it.

As we walked out the resident in 5K asked us to confirm what she had overheard. “Did she actually say I was just a crazy, jealous girlfriend?! That whore!”

We, of course, couldn’t confirm anything but it had obviously been said rhetorically. Accusations of faked 911 calls didn’t bother her but being jealous of that ho? That was too much.

Another door breaking episode followed three weeks later. The woman hadn’t been home but arrived while we were there. As we were milling around there was talk among the police about how the apartment was running the risk of being labeled a “chronic call address” which would make it less likely to be broken into, even if the actual resident placed a real call to 911 in the future. They also noted that the investigations into the origin of the 911 calls had been traced to cheap ‘burner’ phones that can be easily purchased at convenience stores. This piqued the interest of the woman who was being harassed.

Our next phone call to the building was for apartment 5K. I suspected another ‘burner’ phone had been purchased to make this call requesting assistance for a “poor old woman in the late stages of syphilis”. The caller suggested that the patient was “going crazy with dementia” and “losing her mind, very disoriented”. The caller had described the patient as “looking very old for her age” and seeing lots of men come and go from her apartment.

When we showed up at 5K the woman was home. She shook her head while telling us that her neighbor in 5G was very childish and should be arrested for making fake 911 calls. “That kind of thing could endanger the public!” she said with great concern.

I noted that 5G always seemed to be out and 5K always seemed to be home. As we left I told my partner that I felt that 5G should be very leery of 5K since she seemed to have far more time on her hands.

We ran into the same cops who came on these jobs on other calls and they told us that they had received several non-medical calls to the two apartments as well. Callers claimed criminal activity was going on which were also unfounded. They were growing tired of the feud and hoped one of them would move.

Things began to escalate when a third apartment needed to be broken into: 10B. The caller had described a distraught male who was indicating that he was going to kill himself because his “saint of a girlfriend had left him”. The caller stated that his new “whore girlfriend” made him “very sad” and he had told her he was thinking of hanging himself. No one was found in that apartment either. It seemed fairly obvious to my partner and I that 10B was somehow related to the fight going on with 5G and 5K given the overly descriptive details provided by the caller. The police agreed and two of the went down to 5G and 5K to see if they could provide any assistance. 5K seemed like one of those nosy busybodies that most buildings have, the ones that keep tabs on all the neighbors. I was sure she’d provide some valuable insight.

The cops provided us with some juicy new developments to the ongoing saga. The man who lived in 10B had dated 5K but was now preparing to move in with 5G. The cops were rubbing their foreheads as if they had developed massive migraines. Things were only going to get worse.

The boyfriend had confirmed that 5K hated 5G and couldn’t understand why she had such anger towards his new, wonderful girlfriend. He had no doubt that she was behind the packages of excrement that poor 5G had received and the sexual devices that kept getting delivered to her job. The man who lived in 10B had said that he was now finding scratches on his car and had discovered that for several days he had been driving around with large plastic dildos suction cupped to his front and rear bumpers. As someone who did deliveries as part of his job, he was furious that 5G was interfering with his income.

For a while things went silent with that building, for us anyway. Sometimes we would go on calls nearby and wonder what happened to the love triangle. I guessed that 10B and 5G would have made amateurish efforts to exact revenge on the more creative 5K and she would have retaliated tenfold, having been the thwarted lover and also having so much free time. But their efforts no longer involved calling 911 so we could only speculate.

But about a year later we were sent back to the building for the boyfriend who was no longer living in 10B. He was now shacked up in 14A with another woman. Were there no single ladies living in other buildings for him to date? No wonder the man thought he was having a heart attack living under these stressful conditions where at any moment he could run into his ex’s.

His heart was running a little erratically, producing extra complexes. It probably had nothing to do with his love life but he told us those women on the fifth floor were crazy and had caused him a great deal of stress. If they had joined forced and doubled down their efforts on him alone it was possible. But I doubted those two women had settled their differences that far. As we left I glanced at the new woman in his life. I wondered how she had come into his life and if she knew the other women from more than just her boyfriend’s stories of harassment. I assumed if she was she was also getting strange packages and having sexual devices affixed to her vehicle.