Family’s Lawsuit Claims Incident Was Mis-Handled

The family of a murdered Texas woman has filed a federal lawsuit claiming dispatchers delayed a police response to her 911 call for help last month, and that the officers who were eventually dispatched to the call stopped at a 7-Eleven store enroute to make personal purchases. Furthermore, the lawsuit claims, when officers arrived at Deanna Cook’s residence 50 minutes after her call, they knocked on her door but failed to take any other investigative actions when she didn’t respond, and left the scene without discovering that she had been murdered. Cook’s body was discovered by the family two days later, and police later arrested her ex-husband for murder. Dallas police officials say the calltaker was suspended for 10 days without pay and transferred out of the comm center  for mishandling Cook’s 911 call. According to police, the 911 call lasted 11 minutes, and from the sounds on the call, the calltaker should have realized he incident was an emergency. A second calltaker was fired for mishandling the family’s phone call reporting that Cook had not reported to work and that water was coming from underneath her apartment door. Two supervisors were reprimanded for not properly monitoring incidents and dispatchers. Read more about the incident here, and download (pdf) the lawsuit court documents here.