It was 3 a.m. when 80-year-old Bernice Kennedy heard the Lawrence Police officers break through her front door.

“It’s a wonder I didn’t have a heart attack,” said Kennedy, who got out of bed in her nightgown and found three officers searching through the home where she lives with her 82-year-old husband, Bernard.

It was all a big mistake.

The officers went to the Kennedy’s home in the 2500 block of Alister Drive early Monday after emergency dispatchers incorrectly told them there was a suicidal woman in the home. The intrusion happened because of a mix of human error and good intentions, officials said later – but the Kennedys said they weren’t satisfied with the answers they’ve heard so far.

“It needs to be corrected somehow,” Bernice Kennedy said. “I hate to think that somebody else would go through this.”

Here’s what happened:

Early Monday morning, dispatchers at the county’s emergency-communications center, 111 E. 11th St., got a call from a distraught woman who asked for information about a suicide-crisis line. The dispatcher kept the woman on the line and began talking with her about her situation.

Bernice and Bernard Kennedy, of Alister Drive, look though their new front door Thursday. The old door was damaged early Monday after Lawrence Police officers forced their way into the Kennedy home about 3 a.m. The officers were responding to a 911 suicide call and entered the wrong dwelling. The right dwelling was actually somewhere in Oklahoma. The Kennedys say the officers did not adequately investigate before barging in, but officials say it was an honest mistake.

The call didn’t come in on the 911 line, so the dispatchers’ computer display didn’t show the number or address from where the woman was calling, said Selma Southard, assistant director of emergency communication.

Instead, the call came in on a nonemergency line and rolled to a four-digit extension within the dispatch center. As the woman described her suicidal intentions, another dispatcher decided it would be a good idea to trace the line to find the origin of the call, Southard said.

But instead of asking the phone company to trace the line – which would have revealed the call was coming from Oklahoma – the dispatcher called directory assistance and asked for a “reverse lookup,” which matches a phone number with an address, Southard said.

By mistake, the dispatcher looked up the Kennedys’ number, which has the same last four digits as the dispatch-center’s extension.

About the time officers arrived at the home, Southard said, the woman in Oklahoma who called for help told dispatchers she’d taken a drug that would kill her in five minutes and that she was sitting in an idling car in her garage.

Bernice Kennedy said officers should have done more investigating before breaking down her door. But Sgt. Dan Ward, a police spokesman, said the officers acted properly in an emergency, given the information they had.

“We forced entry to try to save somebody, but we weren’t at the right place,” Ward said. “We did everything that we thought we needed to do.”

Ward said the officers knocked before forcing their way inside. But Bernice Kennedy said her hearing is fine, and she insists she didn’t hear a sound until her door was broken.

Southard said that after realizing the mistake, the phone company traced the phone call to Oklahoma. She said authorities there are trying to find the woman, and she and Douglas County Administrator Craig Weinaug said they’ve been told the woman has been placing similar calls to other states.

• 6News video: Lawrence Police break down door by mistake (10-13-05)
• Douglas County information on 911 calls
• Link to FCC discussion on accidental 911 calls

“What we found out subsequently is that this is a person in Oklahoma who has done this to numerous law-enforcement agencies,” Weinaug said.

The Kennedys said their door was replaced earlier this week and the county has agreed to pay the bill. As of Thursday, the Kennedys didn’t know how much it would cost because they hadn’t received a bill.

Southard said that after the mistake, she reviewed procedures with dispatchers and did extra training to ensure that it wouldn’t happen again. She said she also apologized to one of the Kennedys’ sons.

In Southard’s view, it was a freak accident.

“It’s kind of one of those things that you wouldn’t think would happen that just happened,” she said. “It’s three dispatchers working. It’s busy, and it happened. We wish it hadn’t.”