Wrongful Death Lawsuit Case
In the wake of a wrongful death lawsuit that claims the city of Cincinnati's procedures were at fault for the death of a 20-month-old child whose mentally ill father kidnapped and killed her in 2005, The Enquirer examined hundreds of pages of public records related to the case.
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The girl, Aliyah Myrick, would have turned 5 on Monday.
Lanetta Myrick was frantic as she chased her estranged husband, who had snatched their daughter and was running away.
Darius Myrick had been acting strange lately. She suspected mental illness.
Lanetta Myrick was certain that Aliyah, almost 21 months old, was in danger.
"He's got my baby; he running with my baby. Please, help me ...," she begged a Cincinnati Police Department 911 operator.
Lanetta Myrick lost the connection. She called 911 again.
The instructions she got didn't make sense to her.
Operator Valencia Wells told her to stop chasing her husband and go home to her Over-the-Rhine apartment to make a proper complaint.
"I'm not going to know where he's at," Lanetta Myrick told Wells. "I'm not going to be able to tell the police where he's at."
Reluctantly, she listened to the dispatcher. Her last glimpse of her daughter was of Aliyah crying, fear in her eyes as her dad carried her out of sight.
Aliyah was found 11 hours later, dead in Inwood Park in Mount Auburn.
If Lanetta Myrick hadn't obeyed the 911 operator, would Aliyah be alive today?
More than three years after the tragic death of Aliyah in October 2005, the question lingers.
"My gut instinct was to follow him," Myrick said. "(I think) all the time, if I had just not listened to them, if I had just not went back..."
After three doctors did more than a dozen evaluations, three Hamilton County judges last fall found Darius Myrick not guilty by reason of insanity on a charge of aggravated murder.
While Lanetta Myrick is haunted by thoughts of giving up the chase, she's frustrated the police department concluded the operators followed proper procedures. No policy changes were made.
The dispatcher who told her to stop, Wells, wasn't disciplined. She still answers the phones.
"This should never happen again," Myrick said. "When somebody is saying they are in trouble or something is going on, they should be taken seriously, immediately, as if it were their own family."
Cincinnati police would not respond to questions about how Lanetta Myrick's calls were handled.
Two reports, one written by Lt. Jeff Butler, the other by former City Manager David Rager, say the dispatchers did nothing wrong.