Philly Police are investigating a bungled 911 response the day before the Kingsessing mass shooting

Philadelphia Police have opened an internal investigation into why officers were dispatched to the wrong address on July 2 after a woman called 911 to report hearing gunfire at a house in Kingsessing — a mistake that authorities say occurred nearly two days before the same gunman returned to the same street and fired the same assault rifle in seemingly indiscriminate fashion, killing four more people and injuring several others.

Commissioner Danielle Outlaw, speaking at an afternoon news conference, said police received one 911 call on July 2 around 2 a.m. for a report of a shooting on the 1600 block of 56th Street. But she said officers were instead sent to North 56th Street, about three miles away from the crime scene on South 56th Street.

The reason for that error was not immediately clear, officials said, although they suggested it could have happened if a dispatcher manually entered location data into their system, as opposed to automatically importing information associated with the caller’s phone. In any case, when officers arrived on North 56th Street, they found no evidence of a shooting, and a dispatcher reached back out to the caller, who officials said did not provide enough information to allow them to realize they had gone to the wrong neighborhood.

The woman who placed the call acknowledged in an interview Monday that she heard back from a dispatcher, but said she hung up after being placed on hold because she didn’t think authorities were taking her call seriously. And she attributed that mistrust of police to personal experience: Two of her sons were recently killed, one in 2021, another in 2022, and neither case has been solved, she said.

Seeing gunfire on her block left her “traumatized, really, because all of it came flooding back about my sons, too,” said the woman, who asked not to be identified for fear of reprisal.

The implications of the mishandled 911 response are now at the heart of the investigation of a crime that stunned the city and attracted national attention. The initial shooting, at 12:30 a.m. on July 2, left 31-year-old Joseph Wamah Jr. dead inside his home — and went effectively unnoticed by authorities, and unreported by other neighbors, for 44 hours. After that, police say, the gunman, Kimbrady Carriker, went on a harrowing rampage in the neighborhood, killing and wounding more victims, including children. In all, officials said, he shot and killed five people and wounded two others, and two people were injured by shards of glass.

Carriker was arrested not long after the shooting spree on July 3 and told police he had taken action in an attempt to help authorities address the city’s gun violence crisis, sources have told The Inquirer. He is jailed on charges including five counts of murder.

Authorities initially thought Wamah was killed during that mass shooting because his body was discovered later that night by his father. But Deputy Commissioner Frank Vanore said Monday that authorities began reinvestigating the timeline late last week, and that evidence from witnesses and the Medical Examiner’s Office suggested Wamah had been killed at least a day earlier.

Investigators later tracked down evidence of the 911 call from July 2, which they did not initially see because it was assigned to the wrong address, Vanore said. Police said they do not suspect Carriker killed anyone else during his two-day rampage.

Still, even as officials offered some clarity on the sequence of events, a number of questions about the crime remained unanswered — including whether or why Carriker may have targeted Wamah, who was killed inside his house after Carriker allegedly fired shots through the door. Police and neighbors said Carriker yelled that he was acting as a law enforcement agent before shooting into Wamah’s house, then going inside to shoot again.

Vanore said investigators didn’t have any indication that Wamah and Carriker knew each other. Police and prosecutors declined to comment further, saying Carriker’s motive was one of the many aspects of the case still under investigation.

Residents in Kingsessing, meanwhile, were left wondering how things might have been different if Wamah’s killing hadn’t gone unaddressed for so long.

Outlaw said “hindsight is always perfect.” But she cautioned against what she called “speculation” that a more effective 911 response would have stopped Carriker’s rampage. The 911 call on July 2 was not placed until more than an hour after Wamah was shot, she said, and the description of the shooter was vague and “fairly limited,” meaning officers may not have been able to identify and arrest him before he started shooting again on July 3.

“While it may have given us an investigative lead,” Outlaw said, “the likelihood of … cutting off what happened later on, we just don’t know.”

Police now believe Carriker shot into Wamah’s house around 12:30 a.m. on July 2. The woman who called 911 said she was in her home at the time and startled by the crack of gunshots. She looked out through her porch door, she said, and saw a man in the street, dressed in all black, pointing a large rifle at a house across from hers.

“Police!” she heard the man yell. “Sheriff!” Then he charged into the house, she said, and began shooting again.

Within moments, the witness said, she saw the gunman — clearly not a police officer — run out of the house and turn onto Springfield Avenue. She said she waited for the police to respond on their own, and, when they didn’t, she called 911.

Police radio recordings reviewed by The Inquirer provide some clues about what happened next as the officers were dispatched just after 2 a.m.

“Emergency priority one: a person with a gun, 1600 North 56th Street,” the dispatcher said at 2:04 a.m., according to the recordings. “Gunshots heard from inside the home, door is open.”

“Is there an actual address, or just the street?” an officer asked a few minutes later.

“1600 North 56th Street, that’s all we have,” the dispatcher responded.

About five minutes later, officers followed up on the address, saying there was no door open and that a resident on the block said they didn’t hear any shots. But the dispatcher had no more information to share, saying: “The caller hung up and she doesn’t want to be involved.”

Finally, after about 10 minutes of surveying the block, officers reported back that nothing was found.

“There’s no open property out here. We just surveyed. No stuff showing. It’s negative,” the officer said.

“Proceed,” the dispatcher said, indicating the police could leave.

A few seconds later, the dispatcher announced the shooting was unfounded.

Police said their internal investigation would seek to sort out why the officers were sent to the wrong address. But Deputy Commissioner Krista Dahl-Campbell alluded to one possibility during Monday’s news conference, saying it is typical for dispatchers to manually enter location information into their system — as opposed to automatically importing location data associated with a call — because callers frequently reach out about crimes that occurred somewhere else.

“In this instance, they put the correct street number and block number but not the correct north or south,” Dahl-Campbell said.

Outlaw said whatever happened, police would seek to make any improvements necessary to try to prevent such mistakes from happening again.

“To be clear, even if we do not uncover any policy or procedural violations and determine that this was a case of human error, it’s our responsibility to determine what fail-safes can be implemented in order to mitigate the chances of something like this,” she said.

Some residents on 56th Street still had questions.

Keisha Carter, one of Wamah’s neighbors who heard the early-morning gunshots on July 2, said it was “horrible” that police dispatched officers to the wrong address, a mistake that she said could have cost people their lives.

”It’s no excuse that y’all were sent to the wrong block because if that’s the case they could’ve followed the number they called them from, tracked it, and seen where it was at,” Carter said Monday.

Although Wamah may not have survived even if police responded to the 911 call, said Carter, she thought authorities may have been able to prevent the mass shooting the next day.

”He might not have made it out alive because of how many shots was going off in there,” said Carter. “But I felt like what happened [July 3], a lot of people would have been alive because they could have found out who did that to Joseph.”

One of Wamah’s cousins, Sharon Johnson, stopped by his house Monday morning, hoping to find relatives. When she saw that nobody was home, Johnson sat on the front steps, where the family had set up a memorial. A photo of Wamah was adorned with blue balloons, candles, flowers, and a teddy bear. A basketball trophy was leaning against the photo.

Johnson, 61, who lives in Philadelphia, said Wamah was a hardworking, multitalented young man who was getting ready to start a new job. He was an artist and loved to play basketball, she said, and his death has shattered the family.

”It’s devastating,” she said. “A murder in the family is very devastating.”

Staff writers Chris A. Williams and Rob Tornoe contributed to this article.