Police chief admits 911 failed Dallas woman - Dallas News | myFOXdfw.com

Dallas Police Chief David Brown said he wants answers about why a 911 call from a woman who was being murdered was mishandled.

Deanna Cook called 911 on Friday morning screaming that her ex-husband, Delvecchio Patrick, was attacking her.

The call came from a cellphone and the operator had trouble getting a good location to send officers. But the operator did eventually find the address and forwarded the information to a dispatcher who sent officers to the home.

However, the call was not listed as a priority one call, which is the highest priority. Sources with the Dallas Police Department who heard it said it should have been, though, because it was clear Cook was fighting for her life.

The responding officers knocked on her door and looked in windows. But they left after neighbors said they hadn't heard anything suspicious.

Two days later Cook's family members found her dead inside her bathtub.

Chief Brown discussed the investigation on Wednesday.

"Obviously the outcome is not what we wanted to occur. We wanted to get in there and save her life. We don't know if we could have but we are going to look at everything we did and make sure that if corrective action needs to be taken it will be taken. And if some procedures or protocols need to be changed or improved we do that. And, of course, this homicide conviction is important to us. We want a conviction," he said.

The chief said the investigation into why the call was not made a priority could take up to three weeks.

But he said he has already made one change in how calls like these are handled in the future.

"Expediting the automatic escalation of a call to a 911 center to the highest priority so that we can get the quickest response possible given it may come in as a routine call. But based on what's said on the tape, based on what's said to the clerk, we want to make sure that it's automatically escalated to the highest priority, which is what didn't happen here. It stayed at a routine call and the response is not what we would have liked it to be," he said.

Patrick was arrested and charged with capital murder.