Law enforcement watchdogs say there should have been ‘more follow-up’ after bungled 911 call prior to Kingsessing mass shooting

Law enforcement officials and police watchdogs said Philadelphia Police could have done more to investigate the initial 911 call about the shooting that killed Joseph Wamah Jr. in Southwest Philadelphia — a full 44 hours before his body was discovered after police say the same gunman went on a rampage and killed four more people and wounded others in the same neighborhood.

A priority one emergency. A man with a gun firing into a rowhouse. An open door.

That’s what dispatchers sent officers to find shortly after 2 a.m. on July 2. But when police responded to the 1600 block of North 56th Street to investigate, they found no evidence of a shooting or an open door. It took six days for authorities to learn that those officers were three miles from the actual crime scene on the 1600 block of South 56th Street, where 40-year-old Kimbrady Carriker had allegedly just gunned down Wamah inside his home.

“It seems strange that such a detailed and violent act, when investigated by responding officers, and found to have not occurred, didn’t result in them double checking the address,” said Hans Menos, the former director of the Philadelphia Police Advisory Commission who is now a vice president at the Center for Policing Equity, a nonprofit that advocates for police reform.

Police on Monday blamed a dispatch error, said the initial 911 caller was uncooperative when they tried to get more information, and announced that what happened is now under internal investigation.

The mistake is at the center of the shapeshifting timeline of the mass shooting in Southwest Philadelphia less than two days later, when police say the same gunman roamed the streets in body armor with an assault-style rifle and opened fire at random, killing four more people and injuring two children. It was one of the deadliest shootings in city history — and the revelation that Wamah had been killed nearly two days earlier has led some residents to question whether a proper response could have led police to Carriker before he allegedly killed again.

Brian Higgins, a former police chief in Bergen County, N.J., said street direction errors are common in dispatch response. But in grid-based cities such as Philadelphia, north and south orientations of the same address can be city miles apart.

Dispatchers, responding officers, and police supervisors on duty that morning should have been aware of this possibility, he said. And given the gravity of the initial emergency call, he said, they should not have given up so readily on tracking down the correct scene.

“Something that serious, there should have been more follow-up,” said Higgins, who is now an adjunct professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “If you have a street separated by east and west, there should be a follow-up to both locations. If someone calls in and said there’s a shooting in Philadelphia, you can’t blanket the whole city, but you had one specific phone call — a pretty serious phone call.”

Police have not released the audio of the initial 911 call, but in public police dispatch recordings detailing the response, officers sounded puzzled as they searched for a shot-up door on the wrong block.

While the investigation remains ongoing, Deputy Commissioner Krista Dahl-Campbell, who oversees call-center operations, said Monday that dispatchers often manually enter location data into their system rather than using geolocated information from the caller’s cell phone. When officers arrived on North 56th Street and found no evidence of a shooting, a dispatcher reached back out to the initial caller, but officials said the caller did not provide enough information to let police know they were on the wrong block.

At that point, police on North 56th Street were then told to “search the block real quick, do a drive-by and see if you see any doors open,” according to the police dispatch recordings reviewed by The Inquirer.

The woman who placed the 911 call acknowledged in an interview Monday that a dispatcher had called her back for more information, but said she hung up after being placed on hold. She said two of her sons had been killed in the last two years, and neither case has been solved, which led her to believe the authorities were not taking her call seriously that morning.

The 911 call center fields more than 7,000 calls a day — and unfounded reports of a person with a weapon are not uncommon. Still, the department’s police dispatch center has been beset by staffing shortages since the pandemic. An Inquirer analysis last year found that, in 2021, police response had slowed by four minutes on average compared with the previous year. Dahl-Campbell did not speak to staffing levels on the morning of Wamah’s shooting.

“It’s unfortunately summer time, and it is busy, but they were getting to calls and answering 911 as they came in,” she said.

Wamah’s body was discovered by his father after the mass shooting on Monday night, but it wasn’t until the medical examiner pinpointed Wamah’s time of death that police realized their timeline was off. Further investigation led authorities to surveillance video that shows a man in a mask and dark-colored clothing that they believe to be Carriker shooting into Wamah’s door. Ballistic evidence matched the weapons used in the mass shooting.

Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw said Monday that “hindsight is always perfect,” and she cautioned against what she called “speculation” about whether police could have apprehended Carriker sooner.

Menos, of the Center for Policing Equity, said the department should see this as an opportunity to build trust in police as the investigation unfolds into what went wrong.

“If the community can’t accept a mistake, it’s a canary in the coal mine and probably indicates that the police have work to do to improve their legitimacy in the community,” Menos said. “If they do, communities can be more forgiving when they make honest mistakes.”