Elderly Man Fell At My Work Today, His Wife Refused When We Offered To Call 911

Location: California

I work at a restaurant and today an elderly man with a cane that didn’t talk much and his wife that appeared to be younger than him walked in. After I helped them order, they went over to the soda machine and thats where he fell. I did not see the fall happen but I heard some commotion and the wife said the man hit his head on a chair nearby.

When I rushed over to the scene, the man was getting up with some help from his wife and both me and my supervisor kept offering to call 911 for them. The wife refused and said he just needed to sit down. Also, the floor wasn’t wet and there is a carpet with a rubber bottom that doesn’t move easily where our soda machine is.

Throughout their time in the restaurant I went to check up on them and asked repeatedly if they need us to call emergency services but the wife kept refusing while the husband didn’t say anything.

Should I have just called 911 anyways despite the wife’s refusal?

My supervisor said she’s never had a customer fall and when I kept asking if we should call she said we did the most we could do because the wife kept refusing when we offered to call. My supervisor also messaged our manager about the incident but he never got back to us, at least when I was there. Our work training mostly consisted of food handling stuff and obtaining the license for that, at least from what I recall. We don’t have any kind of yearly training on what should happen if a customer falls.

I’m only 20 and I I haven’t had much experience at all with the law regarding these things but now I’m worried about what I should do if another situation happens again like this at my workplace. I feel like it would be common sense to call 911 but when help is refused I don’t know what to do in that situation. I am also concerned about legal actions the customers could take if the man has complications later since we didn’t immediately call 911.

Any advice is helpful, thank you.

Edit: Thank you all for your advice! If something like this were to happen again I will just call regardless of refusal from the spouse or family member of the person who fell and refusal from my supervisor. I’m going to try and push my manager on this issue since I feel there was more my supervisor could have done to step in or take an incident report regardless of the customer’s refusal for us to call 911.