LAPORTE -- A law that makes counties immune from lawsuits resulting from 911 service frustrates the father of a woman who called 911 and pleaded futilely for a police escort an hour before her enraged husband shot her and her mother dead.
"There's nothing I can do. My hands are tied," Al Goble told the South Bend Tribune.
Goble's daughter Tonya Goble, 24, and her mother, Vicki Dewey, 52, were shot dead April 28, 2006, at the Dewey home in Chikaming Township, Mich., about 15 miles north of LaPorte. Goble had been living with her mother and stepfather to escape a violent relationship with her husband, Gary Studer, 31, of LaPorte, who was later sentenced to four life sentences in the deaths.
A 911 tape showed Goble called 911 from Renaissance Academy, a private school across from the Studer home in northern LaPorte County, to say she feared her husband would kill her.
A dispatcher, whose name was not released, told Studer she could not send an officer unless there was an "immediate threat."
The killings happened about an hour later, after Goble and her mother fled to her mother's Michigan home.
Al Goble has tried to sue LaPorte County for not sending an officer when his daughter requested help. But attorneys have advised him that state law makes counties immune to suits resulting from 911 service.
LaPorte County Commissioner Barbara Huston said commissioners decided there wasn't anything they would have had the dispatcher do differently.
"I'm terribly sorry this poor woman was killed by her husband," Huston said. But, she added, police can't dispatch a car out to wait until someone comes back just because there was a threat.
State Sen. Jim Arnold, D-LaPorte, who was the sheriff when Goble made her phone call, said the 911 agency was not under the sheriff's control.
And Arnold regarded the chances of a change in the law protecting counties as unlikely.
"I don't see it. There's such a vast number, or high volume of calls that come in, they're thinking instantaneously, making split-second decisions," he said. "How would you hold a person liable because he made a mistake?"
The protective law, put in place to limit counties' liability as they implemented enhanced 911 services, has been upheld by the Indiana Supreme Court.