Saturday, February 22, 1997
Sheriff Acknowledges Slow Response to Call About Killing
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
TAMPA, Fla. — It took 34 minutes for a deputy to reach the scene after a frantic 911 caller said ”the same guy that cut that girl’s arms off” in California was beating a woman, the sheriff acknowledged on Friday.
By the time the deputy was able to confront Lawrence Singleton Wednesday night, the rapist’s face and chest were covered with blood and the lifeless body of 31-year-old Roxanne Hayes lay on his living room floor.
”We were slow to get there,” Sheriff Cal Henderson said. ”It was shift change time. It was the rush hour traffic time. And when the call initially went out, there were no deputies available to handle that call.”
Singleton, convicted in California of raping a teen-age hitchhiker and chopping off her forearms a decade ago, appeared in court Friday charged with first-degree murder. No bail was set.
”Do I wish we could have gotten there in nine minutes? Yes. Do I think it would have changed anything? No,” Henderson said. ”I don’t think it would have changed the outcome of this if we had a deputy one block away.”
Henderson said the dispatcher did not know who Singleton was and did not pass the information on to the deputy who responded. The department’s average response time to emergency calls is 9.1 minutes, he said.