after hearing teresa strasser on the adam carolla show this morning explaining this horrible news,
this story will haunt me
-those dispatchers need to go hang themselves *imo-
Murdered woman’s husband: 911 botched call
Emergency dispatchers did not pass along exact location of suspect’s car
By Mike Celizic
TODAYShow.com contributor
updated 7:00 a.m. PT, Fri., April. 11, 2008
Nathan Lee knows a day will come when he will have to tell his two young sons what happened to their mother. He’ll tell them about how she was kidnapped, tied up and thrown in the back of a car, managed to call police and got another motorist to call 911 with the exact location of the car transporting her to a brutal death.
And then Lee will have to tell the boys, 2 and 8 months, that the 911 operators didn’t pass on vital information to patrol officers, possibly erasing their mom’s last hope at being rescued. It’s a heartrending task he doesn’t want anybody else to have to face.
“Someday I’m going to have to tell our little boys, who have very few memories, if any, of their amazingly courageous and brave mommy. I will have to tell them that she died needlessly,” Lee told NBC News.
“I want to make sure that somebody else doesn’t have to tell their kids that their mom could have been saved if the proper training was put in place. That’s what my goal is,” Lee told TODAY’s Matt Lauer from Venice, Fla., on Friday.
Lee and his attorney, Thomas Marryott, have announced their intention to file a lawsuit against the Charlotte County Sheriff’s Department in Florida claiming that the 911 call center’s alleged negligence contributed to his wife’s death. The aim isn’t to get money, he said, but to mandate standardized training for all 911 operators.
“The ultimate goal is that some changes need to be made and light has to be brought to this issue, not just on a local level but I think on a national level,” he told Lauer.
Denise Amber Lee was kidnapped at about 2:30 p.m. on Thursday, Jan. 17, from her home in North Port, Fla. At 6:14, she managed to use her kidnapper’s cell phone to call 911 and leave an open connection that allowed the Charlotte County Sheriff to know about the kidnapping. At 6:23 another 911 call from a witness reported a woman who might have been kidnapped in a dark green Camaro.
With police on the lookout for the car, another motorist saw a woman screaming and kicking and beating on the windows of a dark-colored Camaro on I-75. She called 911 at 6:30 and gave dispatchers an exact location of the vehicle and its direction of travel, but for a critical half-hour they “forgot” to pass the information along.
By 9 p.m., the driver of the Camaro, 36-year-old unemployed plumber Michael King, was in custody and a ring and hair that Denise Lee had left in the back seat connected him to the kidnapping. But by then, the 21-year-old wife and mother of two was lying in a shallow grave, stripped of her clothes and dead from a gunshot wound to the head. Her body was recovered two days later.
link: [url=http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24063588/:vcf7tp4o]http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24063588/[/url:vcf7tp4o]
Video: [url=http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/24061302#24061302:vcf7tp4o]http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/24061302#24061302[/url:vcf7tp4o]