Davie Family Claims 911 System Failure Caused Man's Death

Follow CBSMIAMI.COM: Facebook | Twitter

DAVIE (CBSMiami) – A 30-year-old man with a heart condition died Friday and his family says his life could have been saved if emergency responders had come sooner.

Charlie Yaw's mother told CBS4's Carey Codd her son suffered from a longstanding heart condition and it was being treated.

Friday morning, however, his heart stopped and they needed medical care.

At the same time, there was a 911 outage in Broward County.

"911 was not working," said Carol Wolff, Charlie's mother. "You just dialed it and it rang and rang and rang and rang and during that time I was working on my son and I got his heart going a little bit and I could hear it if I put my head to it and I heard it. Then he died because he was waiting for 911 to get here and we couldn't get through," explained his emotional mother.

His mom said they called 911 repeatedly beginning around 11am and the calls were not picked up.

They said other people in the neighborhood called 911 as well without any luck.

The county acknowledged that there was a problem Friday where the 911 system went down and there were outages at the county's three 911-call centers.

The county addressed the issue with a statement that read, "It was revealed that calls received were going into an 'abandoned' call state. While technicians worked to resolve the issue, call takers made attempts to return the calls from the abandoned call list."

Davie police also put out a statement saying they were called to the home around 12:30 in the afternoon.

They said the death appeared natural and there was nothing suspicious.