A widow has claimed that police ignored her 911 call about her husband being taken hostage before he was shot dead.
Qualin Campbell was found dead in Colorado Springs following another emergency call on Friday 2 June just after 2pm that reported the discovery of two unconscious people who may have been shot in a car in the city, according to the Colorado Springs Indy.
The office of Georgia civil rights lawyer Harry Daniels said that Mr Campbell, a 32-year-old Black man, was taken hostage and then killed within a mile of the Colorado Springs Police Department’s Police Operations Center after the agency allegedly failed to take action in a timely manner.
Mr Cambpell’s widow, Talija Campbell, who is represented by Mr Daniels, received a concerning text message from her husband that signalled that he had been taken hostage. She said on Tuesday that she called 911 but that it took the authorities an hour to respond.
On the online police blotter of the Colorado Springs Police Department, it said that two deceased men were discovered on Friday in the area where Ms Campbell had said she was concerned that Mr Campbell was being held by another man. The blotter said officers responded to the area after a shooting was reported there at 2.09pm, according to the Associated Press.
Ms Campbell said he made the 911 call after 1pm as Mr Campbell texted his location along with a photo of a man sitting next to him in his car. “911,” he said in a follow-up text in addition to “Send please!”.
Ms Campbell then called the emergency services. She said she told the dispatcher that she thought her husband had been taken hostage. She then described the location and the car of the father of two before she was transferred to a dispatcher in charge of calls from Colorado Springs. The first dispatcher told the second what Ms Campbell had said, according to the widow, before she said she recapped what she knew to the second dispatcher.
The dispatcher said that an officer would look into the matter, but there seemed to be no rush from their end, Ms Campbell said, prompting her to drive to the area herself.
She said that when she got there, she spotted Mr Campbell’s company vehicle in a parking lot. When she saw her husband slumped over inside the car alongside another man, she started screaming as she fell to her knees.
Others gathered, discussing if they should open the car door after they saw a firearm on the lap of the other man. Ms Campbell said the other man appeared to be unconscious but that he didn’t have any visible wounds, according to the AP.
Ms Campbell opened the door to try to aid her bleeding husband, only to find he had no pulse.
“I shouldn’t have been the one there, the first person to respond,” she told the news agency.
She added that Mr Campbell’s uncle also went to the scene and called the police to say that the 32-year-old was dead.
Police spokesman Robert Tornabene declined to comment to the AP, saying that there’s an “open and active criminal investigation”.
Mr Daniels, the widow’s lawyer, said that she wants to know why the police didn’t take action following her 911 call.
“I can’t think of anything that could take higher precedence than a hostage situation, except maybe an active shooter,” he told the news agency.
The office of the Atlanta attorney said in a statement to The Colorado Springs Indy that “while his wife called 911 immediately to report that her husband was being held hostage and the location where he was being held, no law officers came until Campbell was found dead having bled out from a gunshot to the abdomen roughly an hour later”.
“The Colorado Springs Police Department and El Paso County can make all the excuses they want, but the facts are simple,” he added. “This was a hostage situation where Qualin Campbell was begging for his life, his wife called 911, the police were less than a mile away but they never responded.
“Let’s be clear – if the police don’t respond to a hostage situation, none of us are safe.”
Mr Campbell moved to Colorado Springs in July of last year, according to The Indy. Originally from Newnan, Georgia, he went to the University of West Georgia.
The Independent has reached out to the Colorado Springs Police Department for comment.
