Family Sues after 911 Outage Possibly Leads to Man’s Death

A Davie family is suing Broward County, claiming that the county’s 911 system failed, resulting in a man’s death.

The victim’s mother told Local10.com that she was giving chest compressions to her 30-year-old son Charlie Yaw, who suffered from a heart condition, and could hear his heart beating as she waited for rescue workers to respond to her call for help.

According to the article and witnesses to the incident, though several people called 911 at about 11:00 a.m., the calls were not relayed properly due to an outage, resulting in the calls going unanswered. Yaw did not reach a medical facility until after 12:45 p.m.

Assistant County Administrator Alphonso Jefferson told the news outlet “”It is too early to tell whether today’s 9-1-1 outage contributed to Mr. Yaw’s death….”We are currently researching the timeline to see what actually occurred. “