BATON ROUGE - On Jan. 26, 2024, around 1:30 a.m., 29-year-old Jordan Whitley was driving home on Nicholson Drive.  

At 7 a.m., Louisiana State Police notified Jordan's mother Kendra and his step-father Corey Bazile that Jordan died in a car crash.

"Jordan was a gregarious person. He loved people," Jordan's mom Kendra said. "He liked being around people that he cared for. He loved sports. He loved to travel. He loved to eat good, southern food."

After planning Jordan's funeral and burying her son, Kendra started the healing process. Like any parent, she needed to know her son's last moments. Kendra reached out to first responders to get as much information as possible on the crash.

That's when everything changed.
   
"We stumbled upon some further information. Up until this point, we had been told by State Police that the 911 call came in around 1:54 a.m."

Jordan's Apple watch told a different story. He had been wearing it at the time of the crash. 
   
"I looked through the call history and I noticed there were two calls placed from his phone to 911 that morning around 1:35 and 1:36 about a minute apart."

After doing some research, Kendra found out his Apple watch was connected to his phone, which was synched to his Ford Mustang.

"He did not physically call 911. The car made the call for him."

Ford rolled out 'Sync 911 Assist' in 2009 and the feature has been included in Ford vehicles since then. The system was standard in Jordan's 2019 Ford Mustang GT. In the case of a crash where airbags are deployed, it automatically calls 911.

Before placing the call, 911 Assist gives the driver or passengers ten seconds to manually cancel. If they do not — or cannot — respond in that time frame, the system calls 911, plays and repeats a recorded message. According to the call logs, this happened 19 minutes before dispatch sent first responders to Nicholson.
  
On the first call, the recorded message plays until the dispatcher answers. It is unclear why the recorded message stopped playing.

Less than a minute later, the system calls 911 again. This time it's clear the dispatcher hears the recorded message and appears to press two buttons – possibly to talk to the vehicle occupants and possibly to hear the vehicle location. 

This is the timeline of events that happened after Jordan crashed:

1:37 a.m.: GPS coordinates of a vehicle wreck were sent to EBRSO after the crash response system in Jordan's car contacted law enforcement. There were two calls made and it was listed as a 911 call hang-up
1:41 a.m.: Dispatch sent a deputy to investigate the 911 hang-up on Nicholson. The incident log lists the deputy as four miles away, which is a maximum seven-minute drive time
2:01 a.m.: A deputy arrives at the scene
3:04 a.m.: Coroner arrives, Jordan is declared dead at the scene

"I did not understand why it would have taken 20 minutes to get to the scene," Kendra said. "In a life or death situation like this, every minute matters. Every second matters."  
   
The Sheriff's Office said they were responding to this incident as a 911 hang-up, which according to their policies, "is not classified as an emergency call due to the frequency of unfounded cases." They say in the past year, they received nearly 15,000 hang-ups and only 26 of those calls were actual emergencies.

A spokesperson for the Sheriff's Office also said the deputy likely had trouble locating the crash scene and had to double back several times. The WBRZ Investigative Unit requested the GPS information for the deputy's unit to track the location during the missing 19 minutes and we were told the Sheriff's Office does not track units via GPS.

Kendra says her attempt to get any more answers was met with resistance. She decided to seek legal help and made an appointment with an attorney. The night before that meeting, she went over all of her notes and took one more listen to the 911 calls.
   
"I start from the beginning. I listen to the first call, the automated crash notification from my son's car, expecting only to hear the 911 operator's voice."
   
This time she heard something else.

"I'm thinking that I hear a response, so I listen to it and I'm thinking this can't be. Is my mind playing tricks on me? I listened to it over and over and over that night and I'm hearing in a low tone the word 'help'."

She played the call again for her husband and parents. They all believe they can hear a very faint voice say "Help me."
   
"I think those words will forever haunt me because at that moment I realized that my son had initially survived the accident and he was asking for help and help didn't get there soon enough."

The coroner determined Jordan died from multi-system trauma caused by a car crash. The report has his time of death at 3:04 a.m.. That's when the coroner arrived on the scene and declared him dead. It's unknown when he actually died.

"We will never know if an appropriate response had been made to those initial 911 calls, would it have made a difference?"

According to his car's crash retrieval data, Jordan was going 113 miles per hour two seconds before impact. He hit a tree at a speed of 87 miles per hour. A toxicology report showed his blood alcohol content was just slightly above the legal limit at .089.

Whether Jordan survived the initial impact is a question that will never be answered, but Kendra and her husband Corey believe the questions they have surrounding the emergency response should be acknowledged.
   
"We don't know what could have occurred if he still might have died or if there was a chance to save him, but we feel like the questions that we ask as parents are valid, but they're met with resistance," Corey said.

They question why it took 20 minutes for the deputy to arrive at the crash scene. Why did the automated crash recording information not get relayed?
   
"From this point, I know there is nothing that can be done for my son now, but maybe if there's a flaw in the response protocol, maybe it can save someone else's son. Someone else's loved one. Maybe it's something that needs to be addressed and fixed."

When we tried to ask EMS these questions, we were directed to the Parish Attorney's Office. They did not respond.