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Grieving Mother Blames 911 Outage For Death Of Her Son

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DAVIE (CBSMiami) – Carol Wolff is a grieving mother talking about her son Charlie Yaw.

"911 took my son," she said, "that's the way I feel and it should never happen to anyone again."

He suffered from heart problems and died Friday.  when she called for help, no one answered at the Broward 911 call center.

"I'm burying my son," she said, "I never knew I'd be burying my son.  I always thought I would be going first, not my son, my youngest one."

Steve Geller is a Broward County Commissioner.  He's been briefed on the Friday outage.

"We need to find out how it happened," said Commissioner Geller, "It can not happen again, I mean this is 911.  We're literally talking about life and death cases. "

He's told it was a computer glitch that lasted an hour and has since been fixed.

"The calls kept coming in they were being sent instead of to the operators to a queue that there was nobody at," he said, "So we need to find out how that happened and insure it doesn't happen again."

The medical examiner said it appears Yaw was dead several hours before help arrived, potentially before 911 was even called.  Yaw's mom said that's not possible.

"I don't believe that for a minute because I heard a heartbeat," Wolff said.  "The man across the street heard a heartbeat.  My niece heard a heartbeat. There was a very small heartbeat in there. "

No matter the cause-Geller says it can never happen again.

"Primary duty of government is to protect its citizen, having a lapse like this is unacceptable," he said.

Geller said county officials will meet with the third party vendor that had the glitch.

He expects to have more information at that time along with an "after incident report."   That report should spell out ways to avoid the same problem in the future.

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