The phone rang at 4:43 a.m. on March 27, 2007. Patty Michaels, a dispatcher at a 911 call center in Belleville, Ill., picked up. On the other end, a woman screamed for help. She said her husband had attacked her. Michaels heard a baby crying in the background. The caller’s address appeared on Michaels’ screen: it was in O’Fallon, Ill., less than 10 miles away. Michaels asked the woman to confirm it. “That’s when it got really tricky,” she says. The caller wasn’t in Illinois. She was in South Korea. Two days earlier, the woman and her baby had left O’Fallon…
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