A grim-looking Nathan Lee appeared on the Tuesday night edition of CNN’s “Larry King Live,” interviewed from Florida by King, who seemed ill-prepared and disinterested, and who barely touched on the controversy over the mishandling of 911 calls involving the kidnap and murder of Lee’s wife Denise in Jan. 2008. Following a half-hour segment featuring Judge Judith Sheindlin, Lee recalled the highlights of the incident, including the recent conviction of suspect Michael King, and his death penalty sentence. Lee said the family was satisfied with the outcome, and was “glad” that a judge had sentenced King to death. Lee said his Denise Amber Lee Foundation is working to improve funding for comm centers so they can improve location accuracy, but never mentioned dispatcher training, the original focus of his efforts and the current goal of a foundation named for his wife.
CNN re-played two of the 911 logging tapes, but follow-up remarks by King and Lee didn’t delve deeply into the specifics of how the calls were handled. “Did 911 help at all, or what did they do?” King asked at one point.
Lee explained that there were nine calls to 911 associated with the incident, including one he placed himself upon returning home and finding his wife missing. But Lee’s accounting of the 911 calls was terse and confusing. He did mention a motorist’s 911 call to the Charlotte County sheriff’s comm center reporting an in-distress person in an adjacent car traveling along the highway, and said no one was dispatched in response to that call.
“Nothin’ happened to that, Nathan. Nothin’?” King asked about the motorist’s call. Lee explained that multiple agencies were working on the incident at the time, that several look-outs had been issued, but that, “They never dispatched anybody” to the motorist’s call.
“Why couldn’t they trace this? How did they explain this to you?” King asked. Lee admitted he wasn’t an expert in 911 technology, but said that in his attempt to reform 911, experts had explained it to him. Lee’s explanation properly explained how some cellular companies track handset–triangulation–but apparently is unaware of how GPS is also used in 911 locating.
“I guess the way the system works now, the 911 system, is they use a form of tracking called ‘triangulation,’ where you get pings off of cellphone towers,” Lee said, “and they use these calculations to try to find the location of the person making the call.” He called locating a 911 call “a very tedious and long process, especially with today’s GPS technology, where you can have a GPS on top of your dashboard and see where you’re going and track yourself driving down the road.”
Lee added, “It’s just amazing to me that with today’s technology and the advancements in technology that we can’t track a cellphone more accurately.”
He said that the Denise Amber Lee Foundation that he started is working “alongside the 911 industry” for better accuracy. “How many lives can be saved if you could track a cellphone by GPS?” he asked.
Lee never mentioned the legislation that he and Denise Lee’s father Rick Goff supported existing state legislation to establish a voluntary, non-funded dispatcher certification program. He also didn’t mention the foundation’s own mission statement, which focuses on “uniform training, standardized protocols, defined measurable outcomes,” and which mentions nothing about the accuracy of cellular 911 location systems.
The foundation’s Web site calls the 911 system “splintered” and “without any national regulations.”
Lee smiled only when King asked about his children and Denise. He said his children are doing well, and that he has the support of both sets of grandparents and the entire community in taking care of them. “I don’t feel alone,” he said.
At one point King mistakenly gave the foundation’s Web address as DeniseAmberLee(dash).org and another time as DeniseAlbertLee.org. At one point King said that Nathan Lee’s father had joined in a civil lawsuit against the Charlotte County Sheriff’s Office, instead of Denise Lee’s father.
The foundation Web site is here.
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