Jolene Dufrene initially thought the waiting was the worst part.
It was Father's Day, June 21st. Dufrene's daughter, Lindsay Nichols, 31, hadn't called, and she hadn't picked up her 9-year-old son, Peter. That's how Dufrene knew something was wrong. Her daughter was missing.A friend of Lindsay's had seen a report of a car found burning in New Orleans East on Facebook that morning. It was a black, Honda Accord just like Lindsay's.
"The whole night was like Hell," Dufrene said.
She waited to hear from New Orleans Police, wondered whether that car was, in fact, Lindsay's. Not just for the clues it might provide about where her daughter might be, but because the New Orleans Fire Department found a young woman's body in the trunk.
As it turns out, Dufrene's wait really wasn't the worst part. And it wouldn't even compare to the wait her daughter endured that day.
Lindsay made a frantic call to 911 at 4:48 am.
“She knew she was going to die,” said a good friend of Lindsay’s who was with Lindsay earlier in the night. She asked us not to use her name. (See an earlier story on Lindsay's family looking for answers.)
Notes from the NOPD dispatcher whose call screen lit up that morning show the struggle between Lindsay and an unknown man unfolded with the dispatcher listening on the line. Lindsay told the dispatcher she was in a black Honda Accord outside an apartment complex across from Banner Chevrolet on Chef Menteur Highway. A man had pointed a gun at her.
"She was running for her life and got into her car and was trying to get away from him, but he had her keys," Dufrene said.
Lindsay couldn't drive off. At some point, she dropped the phone, but the 911 call line stayed open. The dispatcher noted that she could hear the man threatening Lindsay in the background and that Lindsay was "crying and screaming."
“She wouldn’t have gone down without a fight,” her friend said.
An arrest warrant says the man accused Lindsay of giving his address to another person and that Lindsay, "moaned and sounded as if she was being attacked."
The dispatcher, Treva Sip, notes that she heard the man tell Lindsay "to open her mouth to take the [gun] in it." Then the line goes dead.
Despite hearing Lindsay's desperate cries, it took the NOPD dispatcher 8 minutes to send a unit to try and find Lindsay.
"Maybe they didn't take it serious enough but from what I understand, she said her life was in danger. I mean, she knew," Dufrene said.
NOPD Communications Director Tyler Gamble said the department launched an internal investigation into the Sip's actions. She resigned Sept. 23 before NOPD completed the probe.
"My daughter called thinking she was going to get help. She may have gotten help if they had handled it differently," Dufrene said.
According to Gamble, Sip never told the police officer who responded to the call what she heard and that the officer didn’t know about the gun or how much danger Lindsay Nichols was in.
"I just knew there was a lot of missteps there," Dufrene said.
Police won't release the 911 recording, citing an exemption in Louisiana's public records law that allows law enforcement agencies to withhold records that are the subject of criminal litigation.
Sip also didn’t log what time the officer got to the apartment complex to try to find Lindsay. An analysis of dispatch records from that night show the officer was just a few blocks away at the time working an accident and executing a warrant.
In all, from the time of Lindsay's frantic call, to the time the officer arrived, couldn't find her and classified it as an unfounded call, 22 minutes passed.
The dispatch delay turned out to be a deadly one. Lindsay's body was found three hours later in the trunk of her Honda Accord on a desolate stretch of roadway near Lake Forest and Michaud Boulevards.
"It's hard. Just knowing that she might could've been saved," Dufrene said through tears.
It would've taken the police officer at least 10 minutes from the time of Lindsay's call to get to the apartment complex where she was fighting off her attacker. That response time is one of the good ones.
WWL-TV and partner newspaper the New Orleans Advocate spent months analyzing five years' worth of NOPD calls for service, examining police response times from the time of the call to the time an officer arrived at the scene. Excluding the calls where police self-initiated the response, our investigation found response times since 2010 for the most serious, "Code 2" emergency calls have nearly doubled from just under 10 minutes to just under 20 minutes.
That goes beyond crimes such as car break-ins, minor accidents, and non-violent property crimes. Those have nearly quadrupled. But the most serious, emergency response times have also soared since Mayor Mitch Landrieu took office.
In an interview last week about the WWL-TV/New Orleans Advocate findings, Harrison pointed out that not all Code 2 calls are true emergencies.
"There's a difference between a Code 2 emergency response when the perpetrator is still there and the victim is in harm's way, and a Code 2 emergency response when the perpetrator is gone and the victim is safe," Harrison said.
New Orleans Inspector General Ed Quatrevaux has been urging the NOPD to re-evaluate their classification system to place calls that aren't true emergencies further down on their priority list. According to Quatrevaux, their analysis of the deployment of NOPD resources showed 47 percent of the calls were Code 2, whereas in most other cities that number is as low as three to five percent.
"If you lump every call, or every other call, into the high priority basket, you're obviously going to miss plenty," Quatrevaux said.
Harrison said the department is in the process of evaluating the issue, with Quatrevaux urging reform now, especially since the department is struggling with a 40-year manpower shortage.
"We are just now beginning to comprehend the impacts of the manpower and the community is paying the price for this in the form of frustration, in the form of fear," said Metropolitan Crime Commission President Rafael Goyeneche.
That fear is coming from cases like Lindsay Nichols' where police arrived late. Other high-profile examples of slow response times for violent crimes are adding to the city's collective anxiety about crime.
Records show it took police 25 minutes to respond after three masked gunmen bounded through the doors of Uptown restaurant Patois with guns drawn in August and robbed 12 people.
Police received the 911 call about it at 11:07 pm. Officers arrived 17 minutes later because ten officers were responding to armed robberies at the time of the call.
Just this month, Doug David, a California tourist, was paralyzed after an apparent road rage incident. It took police 40 minutes to respond and when they did, police said they were never notified he had been transported to the hospital. Without a scene or a victim, police marked the call unfounded.
Something similar happened to Sofia Froeba.
On January 11, Froeba was walking to her SUV on Royal Street. She had just dropped off her boyfriend, Brian Ethridge, at work where he was a bouncer at a bar called the Beach on Bourbon Street.
Froeba, a waif of a woman, had just punched the unlock code into her Mercury Mountaineer when all of a sudden she felt the cold, hard hit of a gun on the back of her head.
"I still have a mark in the back of my head that you can feel," Froeba said.
She said the suspect forced her into her vehicle, where the two struggled. She fought hard to try and get out, but her tiny frame was no match for her attacker. He choked her until she passed out, then pushed her out of the SUV on to Royal Street before taking off in her vehicle.
An unknown good Samaritan walking by was the first to stop and help her.
"I suppose he just thought I was one of the tourists who had been on Bourbon drinking in the road, you know? And he asked me if I was hungry. I said are you crazy? Can I use the phone," Froeba said.
She called Ethridge on the man's cell phone, because the suspect had taken her two phones. Ethridge ran from his post at the bar to help Froeba near the intersection of St Ann and Royal.
"She was laying in a pool of her own blood, could barely move, crying," Ethridge continued, "I've never felt so helpless in my entire life. Nothing worse than not being able to help the person you love."
Ethridge said he called 911. NOPD dispatch records show that call came in at 4:04 am. The dispatch time is listed as five hours later at 9:00 am.
Froeba and Ethridge said they never saw an NOPD officer at the scene of the attack. An ambulance took them to University Medical Center to get Froeba treated for her injuries. Not only was she hit in the back of the head, she was bleeding from the chin and had bruises all over, according to Ethridge.
A heavy-set detective wearing plain clothes with slicked-back black hair did visit them in the hospital room, at least according to the couple. They couldn't remember the detective's name.
NOPD Communications Director Tyler Gamble said he found no record that a detective had spoken with them in the hospital, but he said a new recruit had been sent to the hospital to take a report at 9 am that morning. When the recruit arrived, Froeba had already gone home, so the call was marked up as unfounded.
The dispatcher's notes say there was no answer on a call back to the victim's cell phone.
"To call her phone after it was reported stolen, that's not negligence. That's stupidity," Ethridge said.
According to Ethridge, he had given his cell phone number to the detective they met with in the hospital room because Froeba's two phones were now in the hands of her attacker. But he said he never received a call from NOPD or received any voicemail message from them.
Adding insult to injury, Froeba said she called the 8th District numerous times to try and find out if police had any luck finding her vehicle or her attacker. She even went into the station repeatedly asking for a detective she casually knew to try and get some answers about the case.
Two months later, one of those drop-ins led a detective to finally write a report about the incident. Detective Michael Flores noted in that report that Froeba "didn't know any detective could've helped her."
Ethridge had gone to the 8th District station with her that morning. He said Detective Flores couldn't have been nicer, however, they still haven't seen any progress in the case.
"Apologized for everything that happened, they were gonna get some action, heads were gonna roll. Blah, blah, blah. Yeah, nothing happened," Ethridge said.
"You could maybe understand the police not getting there if they didn't have the officers available, but to see a victim have to go to the lengths you just described to get a report written is unacceptable and I think there should be an internal affairs investigation," Goyeneche said.
"I don't want to get into it because I don't want to cry. But seriously, yeah. It makes me feel like just a number," Froeba said.
To make matters worse, someone has even received traffic citations from the city in the vehicle. Froeba said they were mailed to her ex-husband's address because that's where the SUV was registered.
"How are you getting tickets in a stolen vehicle," Froeba asked.
Gamble said even though NOPD officers review red light camera tickets, there is nothing that flags the vehicles as stolen when they review them.
Froeba and Ethridge both seem to have given up on ever getting their SUV back or on seeing Froeba's attacker brought to justice.
As for Jolene Dufrene, whose daughter was found shot and burned in the trunk of her car, she remains hopeful. Police arrested a local barber, Thayon Samson, 30, for Lindsay Nichols' murder.
The arrest warrant says detectives used DNA and Instagram to connect Samson to bloody clothes that had been bagged and put in the trunk of Lindsay's car. A hand gun was also found stuffed in the trunk next to her body. The fire in the car did burn, but not destroy all the evidence.
"The detectives did such a great job and they found the guy and that was great using DNA and all that but maybe they could have found him that night," Dufrene said about the eight-minute wait to dispatch an officer to try and find Lindsay.
The District Attorney's Office has not yet charged or indicted Samson with Lindsay's murder. As she awaits the next move from the criminal justice system, Dufrene said she can't help but wonder what would've happened if police had sent on officer to help Lindsay sooner.
Could a faster response from police have saved Lindsay Nichols' life?
Jeff Adelson of The New Orleans Advocate contributed to this story