TACOMA – “Please, help me,” said the soft-spoken caller to the 911 dispatcher.
“My daddy killed me with a knife and I’m gone. … Can you please send the Army men or the ambulance?”
The caller gave an address – the wrong address – and hung up. Police and paramedics were sent rushing to help.
A second dispatcher, Kristine Woodrow, then phoned the caller back and reached 8-year-old Anthony Sukto, who calmly described the attack despite his severe wounds.
A transcript of the calls was released Wednesday, two days after the boy’s father, Tony Sukto, 36, pleaded not guilty to the first-degree murder of his wife, Pranee Sukto, 39, and attempted first-degree murder of his son on Oct. 22.
“What’s going on there?” asked Woodrow, 31, who has three preschoolers at home.
“My daddy killed me with a butcher knife,” Anthony said in the 4 a.m. call, his voice composed.
“How did that happen if you are talking to me?” Woodrow asked.
“Because,” Anthony answered. “I don’t know what happened, but something. He grabbed knives. I woke up. My dad, he was killing my mom and then my, my, my dad told me to go onto the other bed and then he’s like, ‘You’re next,’ and then he killed me.
“I’m still alive. I kind of survived.”
At first, Woodrow, a dispatcher at the Law Enforcement Support Agency here for more than eight years, wasn’t sure what was going on.
“He was extremely calm,” she recalled Wednesday. “It didn’t feel real. It wasn’t a typical response from someone who had just witnessed what he witnessed or had just been attacked.”
She asked how old he was.
“Eight,” he said, his voice suddenly more childlike. “Can you hurry?”
“We’re on the way,” Woodrow said.
It still wasn’t clear where he was calling from. When he called in, the computer offered a suburban street and house number that didn’t match. Dispatchers consulted maps as firefighters and police hurried to a wrong address. They tried another, also wrong.
“We weren’t finding him at any address that made sense,” Woodrow recalled. “Units were scrambling all over the place.”
She tried to keep the child on the phone.
“Are you bleeding, Anthony?” she asked.
“Uh huh,” he answered.
“Where are you bleeding from?”
“From my stomach,” the boy said, pain in his voice.
“Are you there by yourself?” Woodrow asked.
“No. My mom is already dead and I am the only survivor,” Anthony said.
His mother had been stabbed 10 times.
He told Woodrow his house was white. He said he lived on Forest Street. He answered questions about his father and his dad’s red Toyota.
“Please hurry,” he said.
Four minutes into the call, he turned abrupt.
“Oh, my gosh,” he said.
“What?” Woodrow asked.
“I have to go,” Anthony said. “Bye.”
And he was gone. Woodrow called back but got no answer.
At 4:17 a.m., Tony Sukto flagged down a firetruck sent to the area. He was standing in the front yard of the family home. Minutes later, police took him into custody.
Anthony is recovering from surgery to repair his lacerated liver at Mary Bridge Children’s Hospital and Health Center.
Woodrow hopes to visit.
“I want to tell him how amazing he is,” she said. “I don’t think he knows that.”
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