Gloria Wagner is a former 9-1-1 dispatcher at Los Angeles Service Center.
History[]
Gloria first appeared in "Awful People", where it is revealed that she worked with Maddie Buckley at the 9-1-1 dispatch center and was reputed for her kindness. After a particularly abusive call, Maddie went into the kitchen, where Gloria gave her a muffin. Gloria comforted her, saying, "There's no controlling someone else's behavior." Gloria also implied her husband had passed away. Josh Russo added that Gloria held the place together.
Once Gloria returned to her desk, however, it was revealed she was an awful dispatcher. She would make her own judgment calls and hang up on several callers after giving them deprecating "advice", believing they were a waste of her time.
During a ride-along, Maddie and Athena Grant found a Vietnamese restaurant that had been robbed. Maddie saved the manager who had been shot. He asked how they could have found him since the 9-1-1 operator hung up on him. Furious, Maddie demanded Josh look over the calls. Gloria had been the man's operator. His accent and labored breathing made his voice difficult to understand but not impossible. Gloria became impatient and threatened to hang up if he did not speak more clearly. He begged her to send help to which Gloria replied, "Yelling at me won't stop the bleeding, okay? I'm not the one who shot you." When the manager began speaking in Vietnamese, Gloria hung up.
After some further investigation, Josh was convinced of Maddie's theory when he discovered hundreds of calls Gloria had mishandled, going back eight months. Josh speculated it may have something to do with her divorce. He also mentions Gloria would be fired and is probably facing criminal charges, as with any operator that does so, even bringing up an operator in Houston, Texas who was sentenced to 18 months for interfering with emergency calls. Gloria confronted and threatened Maddie, calling her a traitor, but Maddie held her ground as Gloria continued screaming that she was justified while the authorities removed her from the dispatch center in handcuffs.
Gloria later bailed out of jail and began texting and calling Maddie incessantly on her personal number, then called 9-1-1 to reach Maddie as an operator, even going as far as impersonating a police officer with the name "Officer Donnelly" which Gloria admits that she made up. While Maddie tries to tell her that misusing 9-1-1 and impersonating an officer are crimes, she overhears Gloria's reckless driving while Gloria continues to scream at her. Gloria eventually loses control of her car and wrecks the vehicle. When the airbags are deployed, Gloria is unable to hear Maddie on the line and wonders if Maddie had hung up on her. Gloria continued to talk out loud and confessed to Maddie that she began hanging up on people because of dead-end calls, in which operators can only helplessly presume a caller's death, unable to offer assistance. Gloria's husband gave her the divorce papers the morning of a bad dead-end call and she hung up on the victim, adamant that they would have died and nothing could be done. Maddie triangulated her position, and Station 118 comes to the rescue. Gloria then thanks Maddie for not hanging up on her, even when the situation seemed hopeless.
Gloria returns in "Careful What You Wish For", as one of the many people reached by Josh and Sue Blevins that Maddie had helped prior, since Maddie didn't believe she was doing much to save the callers by just dispatching units, especially after a recent call that seemingly turned awry with police intervention. Gloria apologized to Maddie for treating her so horribly in the past. She mentions a plea bargain with the authorities to avoid jail time, and also tells Maddie that she was wrong about the dead end calls.
Trivia[]
- Gloria is the first 9-1-1 operator on the show who was arrested for their crimes, with the second being Noah Carmack in the episode "Home Invasion". In both cases, Maddie helped to uncover their crimes, and both later showed remorse for their actions.
Appearances[]
| Season Two | |||||
| "Under Pressure" | "7.1" | "Help Is Not Coming" | "Stuck" | "Awful People" | "Dosed" |
| "Haunted" | "Buck, Actually" | "Hen Begins" | "Merry Ex-Mas" | "New Beginnings" | "Chimney Begins" |
| "Fight or Flight" | "Broken" | "Ocean's 9-1-1" | "Bobby Begins Again" | "Careful What You Wish For" | "This Life We Choose" |