Police came too late: 911 caller is slain
BY FRAN SPIELMAN, CARLOS SADOVI AND ABDON M. PALLASCH STAFF REPORTERS

May 8, 2002

The Chicago Police Department's Internal Affairs Division has launched an investigation to determine why a South Side woman who made three calls to 911 to report that her husband was violating an order of protection was murdered before police arrived on the scene.

A pair of police cars converged on the scene 17 minutes after the victim's first Friday night call to 911, but Ronyale White, 31, was dead on the bedroom floor with a gunshot wound in her head.

Whether a quicker response would have saved White's life is unknown. Even so, the question is why did officers take 17 minutes to arrive at her home in the 10600 block of South La Salle.

Was White's initial call--that her husband was violating the order of protection--given the "Priority 1A" status it deserved?

IAD opened a "complaint registered" in response to questions raised by the Chicago Sun-Times and by Leslie Landis, domestic violence liaison to Mayor Daley.

"Initially, the sequence of calls, when you look at it, appear to be within the guidelines, but it's questionable," police spokesman Pat Camden said.

White made three calls to 911 --at 11:40 p.m., 11:45 p.m. and at 11:50 p.m., prosecutors said.

Although police cars were reportedly dispatched to the scene after each of the three calls, none arrived at White's home until 11:57 p.m. That's when two cars arrived simultaneously and officers found White's body on the bedroom floor, said Larry Langford, spokesman for the city's Office of Emergency Communications.

In the first call, White is heard saying her husband, Louis Drexel, 30, is outside her home and she has an order of protection against him.

Dispatchers then hear her saying, " 'He's inside the house,' " prosecutor LuAnn Rodi Snow said.

In the second call, White says Drexel left the house and was "punching holes in the tires of the Durango. He has a gun," Rodi Snow said. "He said she's going to die."

In the third and final call, operators hear a man's voice threatening death, then a loud noise, apparently a door being kicked in. Five seconds later, two shots are heard and the phone goes dead.

White had locked the door of her bedroom and activated a tape recorder, which captured much of the attack, including the gunshots. After the attack, Drexel put the gun in her hand in a failed attempt to make it appear to be a suicide, the prosecutor said.

Investigators said they think the gun was the same gun Drexel had reported stolen in early April.

After the shooting, Drexel went to his mother's Forest Park home. The mother called police, who arrived on the scene as Drexel was attempting suicide. The bullet grazed his right temple. Drexel was later hospitalized. He wore a blue hospital smock during a bond hearing Tuesday.

He was charged with first-degree murder and ordered held without bond.

The murder of a battered woman who made three frantic calls to 911 angered victims' advocates, including Landis.

"If that's how things transpired, it's a tragedy. The response should have been prompter. . . . Priority One calls should receive a response that's faster than 17 minutes," Landis said.

"We need to examine what we can do to prevent that kind of occurrence in the future. I'm asking them to investigate it."

Joyce Coffee, executive director of Family Rescue, a South Side nonprofit, said she was "saddened" by the police response, especially in light of recent changes that have bolstered police training on domestic violence and elevated emergency calls to the Priority One status that requires immediate dispatch.

Langford acknowledged that the 911 call-taker had the option of dispatching a police car while continuing to question the victim, but chose to interview White fully before radioing the first police car shortly after 11:43 p.m.

"The lady's demeanor was very calm and she was conversational. She didn't say anything in the call that indicated she was about to be bodily harmed. She said he got in with a key. There was no indication that he was kicking in a door. Because there was no weapon on the scene, that might have had something to do with it," he said.