$4.25 Million Awarded Over Mishandled 911 Response

A City has agreed to pay $4.25 million to settle allegations that police officers took too long to respond to 911 calls from a woman minutes before she was shot to death by her estranged husband. In the first of four desperate calls to 911, the decedent said her husband had a gun and was trying to kill her, but officers did not respond to the call for more than 17 minutes. The police department conceded it should have taken no more than a few minutes to respond. When police finally did arrive, they found a crime scene that suggested the husband had kicked down two doors in the house as he pursued his wife and that the two had struggled. The Plaintiffs claimed that one of the officers spent two minutes checking messages on his cell phone and talking on the phone with his brother. He did that while he should have been answering the 911 call. The two officers were suspended for 15 days and the police chief tried to terminate them, but was overturned by an arbitrator.