CHARLESTON, SC – A News 2 investigation finds the deputies sent to the scene of a double murder on Wadmalaw Island initially went to the wrong address.
Dispatchers at the Charleston County 911 Center say Kennitha LaBoard had a Voice over IP (VoIP) phone service or an Internet-based phone that was registered to an address on Langston Drive on John’s Island, which was eight miles from her home at Richard McCloud Lane on Wadmalaw Island.
“Officers were on scene at about 5:29 a.m. and they arrived to the scene that they had the address for. After discussing it with the person at the residence, they were able to determine where the incident was probably occurring and then we shifted our resources to that incident location on Richard McCloud,” said James Lake, director of the Charleston County Consolidated Dispatch Center.
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Deputies were lucky that a relative at Langston Drive was home. The incident report shows that at 5:51 a.m. deputies were following (a) family member to (the) residence.’
Resources were then shifted to the correct address.
LaBoard had called 911 but was unable to give dispatchers information. Her initial call was disconnected and when dispatchers called back they could hear a woman pleading for her life, followed by screaming, and gunshots.
Authorities say two females, LaBoard and her mother, Althea Goss, were found inside the home.
LaBoard’s boyfriend, Termaine Frasier, who is also the father of two of her children, could be heard making several phone calls and saying, “I’m sorry man, I got angry and I wanted to hurt her and I hurt her.”
“What was a little more frustrating in this case was when the officers knocked on the door on Langston, the dispatcher that was on the phone couldn’t hear that. We’re already assuming maybe we are at the wrong address. Maybe there is something not going right. So that creates more frustration on our part because now that we’ve identified this is a serious and critical incident and we’ve sent police and we’ve got them at – what we think is the right address — only to find that they’re not at the correct location,” Lake said.
While this tragic incident serves as an important reminder of why it is so important to physically update address information to an internet-type phone, there are new programs at the 911 Dispatch Center helping eliminate these mix-ups.
“One of the things we are doing with our Smart 911 Program is we’re actually going out and speaking to the victim advocates and explaining to them that especially those that are subjected to domestic violence by registering for that,” Lake said.
A person’s information — even their history of domestic disturbances can be tied to their actual phone number. This way dispatch will waste no time in trying to help someone.
