A few weeks ago my four-year-old son brought home from preschool a large colorful telephone made out of construction paper. Proudly he showed me the skill that he learned that day. “See mommy,” he said, “In an emergency, dial 911.” Children in American learn that these three numbers bring the authorities, safety and relief. There are similar numbers in other countries.  And that's what normally happens. Until it didn’t for the nine-year-old daughter of Kari Rene Hunt. She, along with her younger sister and brother, allegedly watched her mother get brutally murdered by their father in a Texas motel room last month. She did what all children are taught to do in an emergency: she picked up the phone and dialed 911. Except she couldn’t, because the motel room phone system required her to dial an extra 9 first to get an outside line.  She didn’t know about that requisite first digit, and this young and frightened girl punched in the numbers 911 over and over again. All she heard was static. In fright, she grabbed her four-year-old sister and three-year-old brother and pushed them into the hallway. A guest in the room next door found them and called for help. But it was too late. The 31-year-old mother of three, who “loved with purpose”, as her parents told me, was dead.  Later, in the police station, the nine-year-old girl told her grandfather, Hank Hunt, of her attempt to call 911: “Papa, I tried, but I couldn’t do it.”  Normally these tragic details involving a minor don't make the press, but the Hunt family has spoken out in the hopes of saving other lives and changing the law. Hank spoke with me at length.  A lot more could have been done for the Hunt family – and others. An estimated 240m calls are made to 911 in the US each year, according to the Federal Communications Commission. A lot of things go wrong at every level of the system. But when it comes to emergency communications nobody wants to – or has the gumption – to make changes. Its been over 10 years since the National Emergency Number Association, an advocacy organization for emergency communications, suggested model legislation to the FCC and Congress to address the issues surrounding hotels, motels and corporations using these type of communications.  The changes are simple, but necessary. Has anybody ever worked in an office where you don’t have to dial a 9 to get out? It's quite common in the US, yet has any parent ever taught their young child to dial 9-911? I haven’t. I think you would be hard pressed to find anyone who has. But if you're somewhere with a multi-phone line system, you don’t have direct access to 911. Here’s more you don’t have access to: a precise and accurate location signal for first responders, automatic front-desk notification if someone makes a call from inside the system, and a ban on local termination of 911 calls.  In other words, first responders can show up after an emergency call only to be told by the front desk that no one in the building called 911. Or, responders can go to a different building listed in the public directory instead of where the call is coming from, as in the Maryland case of Kaafee Billah who was found dead under his desk 10 hours after he called 911 from his office. Police thought the call was unfounded because they went to a different building in the corporate complex, and because security officers didn’t know a call had been made.  After years of lobbying, last year, tacked on to the Congressional Middle Class and Tax Relief Bill, a provision stated that the FCC would study the issue. The changes that should be made aren't complex. They boil down to three things: direct access to 911, notification to a front-desk site, and a ban on local termination of 911 calls. But most hotels, motels and corporations still use an antiquated system, called a multi-party line. Only 18 states have legislation clarifying emergency procedures, which detail how the systems need to be connected to 911. Some of the laws require that all multi-line systems provide location of the call, a connection to an operator or front desk personnel who can also alert law enforcement or comply with other public 911 laws. However, the legislation is spotty across the states that have it on the books. Some only require compliance when an office complex or hotel is a certain size, in Texas, only one county, Tarrant, is covered by such legislation.  Twenty years ago, perhaps, it would have been an problem to switch all these systems to simpler methods, but today it's not. Technology has caught up and the cost is minimal, Mark Fletcher, chief architect for Worldwide Public Safety Solutions at Avaya Communications, assured me. It’s really a matter of will.  So what's been accomplished? Nothing. This is not a celebrity cause and there's nothing sexy about this type of work – it comes down to dogged advocates and communication experts plodding along – until one day people learn that three young children, called "heroes" by their grandfather, will grow up without their mother. The glue of her close-knit, extended family, a woman in the prime of her life, is now gone forever. Maybe, by as small a detail as the operating system of a motel phone, she could have been saved.  Hunt’s family started a successful online petition on change.org to require hotel/motel rooms to change their systems and drop the dialing “pre-fix”. They want it called Kari’s Law.
Cara Tabachnick: The tragic death of a mother whose children couldn't call 911 illustrates the huge consequences of a seemingly minor detail