Henry County: Database error may have caused 911 mishap leading to officer's death
Henry County 911 Emergency Communications said Friday a 911 call that sent a Clinton, Mo., police officer to a fatal encounter at a wrong house came from a land line and that officials believe there was an error in a street address database.
Officer Christopher Ryan Morton was killed when he and other officers responded to a 911 call that dispatchers thought came from a house in Clinton on Tuesday.
At the house Morton, 30, encountered James E. Waters, who fatally shot Morton while wounding two other officers. Waters was later found dead in a bathroom, and the cause of his death has not been released.
Authorities learned Wednesday that the original 911 call came from Windsor, a town 20 miles away from Clinton, prompting questions about how an emergency call could send responders to an address so far away.
In a statement late Friday afternoon, the agency responsible for Henry County's emergency dispatch service said the original 911 call on Tuesday came from a land line in Windsor and lasted 45 seconds.
The call captured a loud verbal argument between two females, but neither woman responded to the dispatcher's attempts to obtain more information.
Henry County 911 Emergency Communications said that an independent company maintains what's called a Master Street Address Guide, which on Tuesday indicated the location of the call was the house on Grandriver Street in Clinton.
"We now believe this may have been due to an error in the Master Street Address Guide database," the Henry County statement reads. "Occasional errors have been found, rarely, in that database in the past and have been corrected."
Henry County's 911 database is maintained by CenturyLink.
CenturyLink said late Friday evening it had not been contacted by Henry County officials.
"CenturyLink takes all public safety issues seriously, particularly those involving first responders," said Mark Molzen, spokesman for CenturyLink. "We have not been contacted by Henry County."
Henry County officials called the situation a "perfect storm."
"The combination of the error, if true, and an urgent 911 call without the benefit of being able to ask questions of the caller, creates a 'perfect storm' scenario for a 911 Center," Henry County 911 Emergency Communications said in a statement. "The reaction of the occupant of the Grandriver St. home was catastrophic and could not have been anticipated."
Scott Ekberg, the administrator of the Kansas 911 Council, said on Thursday that errors and inaccuracies in street databases can occur on land line calls.
Of the various ways to reach emergency dispatchers, land line calls are considered the most reliable method for dispatchers to pin down the location of a caller, which is helpful in a case where a caller cannot speak to a dispatcher.
But errors in consumer databases are one of the only ways that a land line call can generate the wrong address.
"That could cause a problem in the routing of a call," Ekberg said.
It's up to the phone company that maintains the database to correct errors.
"Whenever we have an error in the land line phone, it's generally a problem in the database," said Steve Hoskins, who manages Kansas City's 911 system as interoperability systems manager for the Kansas City Police Department. "The phone company needs to correct the database."
Though databases at 911 centers are known to contain incorrect addresses due to typos or misspelling, the manner in which the call to Clinton apparently failed "is very rare ... a definite aberration," said Brian Fontes, chief executive of the Virginia-based National Emergency Number Association.
"The whole thing seems odd to me," Fontes said. "There must have been a specific address that appeared on the (dispatcher's) screen because officers responded to a specific address.
"The first thing I'd do is sit down with the developer of the street address guide and ask, 'How did that happen?'" Fontes said.
One wrong location in the database would not necessarily affect the rest of the system. Fontes said when a location is found to be in error in the address guide — perhaps East or West Main Street isn't specified — the fix usually can be made quickly.
Henry County officials are investigating other possibilities for what could have caused the error, including software upgrades, and are summoning outside help to investigate what went wrong this week.
Henry County said its communications center has what's referred to as Phase IIT level of service, the highest level in Missouri under the Missouri 911 Modernization and Improvement Report.
The center answers 14,000 emergency calls a year and runs dispatch for all fire, ambulance and law enforcement agencies in Henry County, except for the Missouri Highway Patrol.
"Henry County 911 Emergency Communications shares the entire Clinton community's and especially our bothers and sisters in law enforcement's grief at the tragic loss of Officer Ryan Morton's life," the county's statement said.
"We, too, pray for healing for his family and friends, his fellow officers also injured, the Clinton Police Department and the entire community as well as the family of the other casualty."
This story was originally published March 9, 2018 at 6:03 PM with the headline "Henry County: Database error may have caused 911 mishap leading to officer's death."