Once upon a time in Chicago

Once upon a time there was a Republican Senator from Minnesota who was a champion of oversight. He rooted out corruption, graft and waste at every level of our government. He was known throughout the realm for his endeavors. But this is a fairy tale, and Sen. Norm Coleman only believes in oversight under very limited circumstances. Before I can tell you the latest way that Norm doesn't "do" oversight, I need to set it up with another fairy tale.

Once upon a time in Chicago, a woman started a non-profit because her daughter had died tragically and preventably in a car crash. Carol Spizzirri's response to losing her daughter is noble. The non-profit's mission is "to provide vital first aid skills to our nation’s youth."

Christina Spizzirri was 18, about to start college and working at a restaurant. She decided not to accompany her mother, two sisters and friends on a Labor Day weekend trip to Florida. On Labor Day night, September 7, 1992, Christina left work. On the way home, she was involved in a car crash that caused severe injuries and bleeding. The first people to arrive at the scene were local police officers, who waited for emergency medical service personnel to administer first aid. Christina bled to death before they arrived.
(Trauma Foundation)

The organization rapidly gained supporters in the Illinois legislature and among Chicago-area suburban mayors. Through the 1990s the organization gained more and more institutional support from all levels of government and throughout the country. The organization got hooked into the US Conference of Mayors (nudge, nudge ... Norm used to be a mayor ... wink, wink). In 2002 the organization was accepted into Homeland Security's Citizen Corps.

Sadly, this is a fairy tale. Carol Spizzirri claimed to have a nursing degree she didn't have and her daughter didn't die as she claimed. The organization cannot substantiate how many children were actually trained.

"My daughter was coming home from work on Labor Day of '92. She was struck by a hit-and-run, and her arm had been severely injured, and she bled to death before EMS arrived," said Spizzirri.

But even that isn't true, according to police and hospital reports and an inquest by the Lake County coroner. The official record states that 18-year-old Christina Spizzirri was legally drunk at the time of the accident; and that after hosting a drinking party while her mother was vacationing in Florida, the teenager got behind the wheel and flipped her own car.

Police records show there was no hit-and-run, and even though the local police didn't know emergency first aid, the teenager did not die at the scene as Carol Spizzirri contends. Medical records state that
Christina died 30 minutes after arriving at the hospital.

I-Team: "It was not a hit and run, was it?"

Spizzirri: "Yes, it was. Oh, my gosh. I got proof of that, absolutely ... I'm done, the interview's over."
(ABC7 I-Team Exclusive)

Chuck Goudie of ABC7 in Chicago followed up repeatedly with Spizzirri and the organization, but was stone-walled. They eventually sued him for defamation, but lost removed him from the lawsuit and paid his expenses.

Goudie also checked into her claim that she was a registered RN:

Spizzirri says she got her nursing degree in Wisconsin. Currently, Save-A-Life's website and her bio claim, not only that she is an RN, but that she specializes in kidney transplants. The I-Team asked if that is true.

"Not at this time," Spizzirri said. "I no longer have. I haven't registered in a number of years."

According to state officials, the now-defunct Wisconsin college where Spizzirri claims to have received a nursing degree never awarded her a degree of any kind, and government records show she has never been registered as a nurse in either Wisconsin, as she told the I-Team she was, or in Illinois.

"I had a nursing degree and I have worked in a hospital," said Spizzirri.

Officials at the Milwaukee hospital where she claims to have been a transplant nurse say she had a paid job for a couple of years, as a patient care assistant akin to a candy striper.
(ABC7 I-Team Exclusive)

Worst of all, the organization is unable or unwilling to provide any data on how many children were actually trained in emergency life-saving techniques.

Schools CEO Arnie Duncan says it seems unlikely that Carol Spizzirri's organization could have taught the number of students they claim, and it's not free to the taxpayers, who give Save-A-Life more than $1 million a year through the Homeland Security department, Centers For Disease Control and the State of Illinois.

"If you have an organization that has mostly volunteers, where's the million dollars going?" said Baratz. "It doesn't take a million dollars to print a pamphlet."

Spizzirri pays herself an annual salary of $120,000, according to Save- A-Life records on file with the Illinois attorney general. She travels on a generous expense account while working to obtain additional
government funding for expansion of her organization nationally.
(ABC7 I-Team Exclusive)

Then there are allegations the organization's plagiarized copyrighted material. Julia Rickert was hired by the organization to edit a training manual. I appears that she copied an EMT training manual.

"I was told by the temp agency that Save-a-Life was looking for somebody to do proofreading, to proofread their instruction manual, a 600 page manual," said Rickert.

Rickert says she was told her assignment was to find misspellings in a new first responder's manual being prepared for it's instructors, but she says her supervisor had something else in mind.

"He never mentioned proofreading at all. He said their manual needed to be edited. They wanted it rewritten on a high school level. They wanted me to rewrite the entire book line by line," said Rickert said.

A Save-A-Life spokesman confirms to ABC7 that temp workers typed the copyrighted book into their system then hired Rickert as a temp who was told to rewrite it. The charity contends it was to be a first draft for a new training curriculum, even though Rickert had no expertise in emergency response.

"I have proofreading experience but not technical writing experience and no medical background," said Rickert.

Save-A-Life officials say when the year-long project is finished, it will be reviewed by "leading local and national EMS stakeholders and our intellectual property attorney," and then "certified by the Illinois Department of Public Health."
(ABC7's 4th I-TEAM article about SALF)

It sounds like they were just repackaging somebody else's work for resale. Suspicious ... isn't it? How much money would the organization have made from reselling someone else's work?

Tomorrow, I will continue this fairy tale of Republican oversight in government with more about this organization and Homeland Security. Norm Coleman plays a role in this and I hope you'll be patient as I explain how.

This might even be a four part trilogy of fairy tales!