Three women, Sandra Smith, Tina Spivey and Nicole Childress, discovered the victim, 14-year-old Konerak Sinthasomphone, after he had managed to escape from Jeffrey Dahmer's apartment, naked, bruised, bleeding from his anus and heavily under the influence of drugs. Childress called 9-1-1 and Balcerzak, Joseph T. Gabrish, and Richard Porubcan responded, along with a fire department ambulance. Ambulance personnel thought Sinthasomphone needed treatment but were sent away by the officers. Though the Laotian immigrant had been in the country for ten years and spoke English fluently, in his drugged and brain-injured state, he was unable to communicate his situation to authorities or to the three women. Dahmer convinced the police that the boy was his 19-year-old lover against the protests of the three women.

Smith recognized the boy from the neighborhood and the three women reiterated their concerns but were told to "shut the hell up" by the officers, who were convinced the incident was a domestic dispute. The three officers returned Sinthasomphone to Dahmer's apartment. Balcerzak said he smelled nothing unusual but Gabrish said he did detect a foul odor, likely emanating from the body of Anthony "Tony" Hughes, who had been murdered by Dahmer three days earlier. The officers listed the incident as a "domestic squabble between homosexuals" and did not otherwise act. Approximately ten minutes after the police left, Glenda Cleveland, Childress's aunt and Smith's mother, called police and was connected with Balcerzak, who dismissed her concern and declined to take the names of her niece and daughter as witnesses. Within an hour, Dahmer murdered Sinthasomphone by strangling him, performed oral sex upon his corpse, and dismembered him. For the murders of Sinthasomphone and 15 others from 1978 to 1991, Dahmer would be sentenced to 16 consecutive terms of life imprisonment without parole in 1992.

In the aftermath of Dahmer's arrest, an audiotape of Balcerzak and Gabrish making homophobic statements to their dispatcher and cracking jokes about having reunited the "lovers" caused heavy criticism. They were fired while Porubcan was put on job probation for one year. By failing to check Dahmer's identification, the officers did not learn that he was a sex offender with a 1988 child molestation conviction where the victim was Sinthasomphone's older brother, who was 13 at the time. Milwaukee later paid the boy's family a sum of $850,000 to settle a lawsuit over police handling of the situation.

Both officers appealed their termination. Judge Robert J. Parins controversially ruled in favor of the officers and they were reinstated in June 1994.