A woman in Minneapolis received quite the untimely surprise when she called 911 — and discovered that her call had been answered by a New York operator.
“She asked me again what borough do I live in, and I’m like Loring Park,” Faye Lewis, who called 911 after she heard a person trying to get into her home, told the local CBS affiliate.
But instead of being connected to the Minneapolis 911 operator located less than two miles from her apartment, Lewis’ call was sent 1,200 miles away to New York.
“I was like I live in Minneapolis,” Lewis said. “And she’s like ‘Oh, you dialed 911 in New York.”
She tried making the call again two minutes later, only to be met with the same result.
While this was all happening, the man who was trying to enter Lewis’ home had made his way down the hall, knocking and attempting to enter the doors of other apartments.
A New York operator eventually ended up contacting Minneapolis with the emergency. Police arrived at her apartment 30 minutes later.
Lewis’ cell phone carrier, T-Mobile, and the city of Minneapolis had no answers as to how or why this exactly happened.
“This is a public safety crisis, really,” Jamie Barnett, director of the advocacy group Find Me 911 in Washington, D.C., told the station.
The group is pushing the government to give the nation’s 911 system an upgrade that would make sure emergency callers can be located.
If you make a call from inside your home, like Lewis did, the cell phone signal does not always have a clear path. This makes it possible for a call to skip cell phone towers and bounce to a different state, according to the CBS Minnesota report.