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Lawrence Journal-World

Police on 911 call break in wrong house

Caller actually dialed from Oklahoma; 80-year-old says officers were rash

Friday, October 14, 2005

It was 3 a.m. when 80-year-old Bernice Kennedy

heard the Lawrence Police officers break through her front door.

“It’s a wonder I didn’t have a heart attack,”

said Kennedy, who got out of bed in her nightgown

and found three officers searching through the

home where she lives with her 82-year-old husband, Bernard.

It was all a big mistake.

The officers went to the Kennedy’s home in the

2500 block of Alister Drive early Monday after

emergency dispatchers incorrectly told them there

was a suicidal woman in the home. The intrusion

happened because of a mix of human error and good

intentions, officials said later — but the

Kennedys said they weren’t satisfied with the answers they’ve heard so far.

“It needs to be corrected somehow,” Bernice

Kennedy said. “I hate to think that somebody else would go through this.”

Here’s what happened:

Early Monday morning, dispatchers at the county’s

emergency-communications center, 111 E. 11th St.,

got a call from a distraught woman who asked for

information about a suicide-crisis line. The

dispatcher kept the woman on the line and began

talking with her about her situation.

The call didn’t come in on the 911 line, so the

dispatchers’ computer display didn’t show the

number or address from where the woman was

calling, said Selma Southard, assistant director of emergency communication.

Instead, the call came in on a nonemergency line

and rolled to a four-digit extension within the

dispatch center. As the woman described her

suicidal intentions, another dispatcher decided

it would be a good idea to trace the line to find

the origin of the call, Southard said.

But instead of asking the phone company to trace

the line — which would have revealed the call was

coming from Oklahoma — the dispatcher called

directory assistance and asked for a “reverse

lookup,” which matches a phone number with an address, Southard said.

By mistake, the dispatcher looked up the

Kennedys’ number, which has the same last four

digits as the dispatch-center’s extension.

About the time officers arrived at the home,

Southard said, the woman in Oklahoma who called

for help told dispatchers she’d taken a drug that

would kill her in five minutes and that she was

sitting in an idling car in her garage.

Bernice Kennedy said officers should have done

more investigating before breaking down her door.

But Sgt. Dan Ward, a police spokesman, said the

officers acted properly in an emergency, given the information they had.

“We forced entry to try to save somebody, but we

weren’t at the right place,” Ward said. “We did

everything that we thought we needed to do.”

Ward said the officers knocked before forcing

their way inside. But Bernice Kennedy said her

hearing is fine, and she insists she didn’t hear

a sound until her door was broken.

Southard said that after realizing the mistake,

the phone company traced the phone call to

Oklahoma. She said authorities there are trying

to find the woman, and she and County

Administrator Craig Weinaug said they’ve been

told the woman has been placing similar calls to other states.

“What we found out subsequently is that this is a

person in Oklahoma who has done this to numerous

law-enforcement agencies,” Weinaug said.

The Kennedys said their door was replaced earlier

this week and the county has agreed to pay the

bill. As of Thursday, the Kennedys didn’t know

how much it would cost because they hadn’t received a bill.

Southard said that after the mistake, she

reviewed procedures with dispatchers and did

extra training to ensure that it wouldn’t happen

again. She said she also apologized to one of the Kennedys’ sons.

In Southard’s view, it was a freak accident.

“It’s kind of one of those things that you

wouldn’t think would happen that just happened,”

she said. “It’s three dispatchers working. It’s

busy, and it happened. We wish it hadn’t.”