Malik Terrell told a 911 operator in Milwaukee that he had beaten a 15-year-old boy bloody and planned to kill him.

He gave the operator his full name and address, 3356 N. 12th St.

But when the operator entered the address into the Police Department’s dispatch system, she made a mistake. She misheard Terrell and typed 10th Street.

So the dispatcher sent two police squad cars to 3356 N. 10th St.

The address did not exist, the officers radioed back.

The dispatcher didn’t ask the operator to double-check the address, newly released records show. And the operator didn’t verify the address with the caller before she typed it in.

On the 911 call, made May 11, the 15-year-old victim can be heard crying in the background.

The police found him eight days later. By then, he was dead.

In failing to verify the address, the operator, Bonnie Muzia, violated the department’s code of conduct, internal affairs investigators found.

Chief Alfonso Morales overruled them. He did not discipline Muzia, who still works for the department. He also did not mandate retraining for Muzia, discipline the police dispatcher, issue formal reminders department-wide to verify addresses or take any other action.

“I listened to the 911 call and did not believe the (operator’s) actions were conducted out of malice intent, but was an unfortunate mistake made out of human error,” Morales told the Journal Sentinel in an emailed statement.

He also offered condolences to the victim’s family. The victim’s mother, Dombanee Lincoln, strongly disagreed with the chief’s decision after learning about it from the Journal Sentinel.

“Someone should be held accountable, not just Malik, but also the operator, the dispatcher or whoever handled the call,” she said.

“They should have done a better job,” she continued. “It doesn’t seem like they knew what they were doing. They didn’t ask the right questions or enough questions. It’s just not fair.”

A ‘violent, sadistic’ homicide

Police spent 30 minutes searching for the caller on 10th Street before moving on to a call for a woman wandering in the middle of a busy street and following up on an earlier incident.

Meanwhile, Terrell’s assault against 15-year-old Dennis King continued.

Terrell claimed someone had robbed him of a video game system at gunpoint. He and his family said they believed Dennis, nicknamed “Booman,” knew something about it.

In trying to make him talk, Terrell and his half-brother attacked the teen with a hammer and severely beat him before stabbing him in the neck.

Then they loaded the teen's body into a garbage cart, rolled it into a vacant house, doused it with lighter fluid and set it on fire.

After the teen’s charred remains were discovered, Terrell, then 21, quickly was arrested in Chicago, where he had fled with the help of his mother.

Terrell pleaded guilty to first-degree intentional homicide. In December, he was sentenced to life in prison.

The judge in the case called it “the most heinous, vicious, violent, sadistic, and depraved homicide this community has seen in many years.”

The criminal complaint charging Terrell with homicide mentioned the 911 call. It said Terrell became irate and ended the call "by simply stating that he is going to kill the person he has detained.”

At sentencing, prosecutor Karl Hayes said Terrell made the “bogus” call to “try to disguise what was actually happening,” according to a transcript.

“There’s a lack of communication between this defendant and the 911 operator, and then on the recording you can hear the defendant simply lose control of himself and say, ‘Well, then I’m just going to kill the guy,’ and he hung up the phone, and then that’s what he did,” Hayes said.

The Journal Sentinel filed a records request for the results of any internal affairs reports related to the homicide in June and again in July. The Police Department denied those requests, citing an ongoing investigation.

The news organization filed a third request in February and received some of the records in late March. The rest of the records were released April 8.

A request for the 911 call audio remains pending but portions of the call were transcribed in the records.

What Terrell told 911: ‘Bleeding from every area’

According to the internal affairs reports:

The 911 call came in at 3:04 p.m. May 11.

“Somebody tried to break in my mama house,” Terrell told Muzia, the 911 operator.

“I beat they ass,” he said. “His name is Dennis, what? What’s your name little boy? Dennis King.”

Muzia asked for his address.

“3356 N. 12th St. and before that, excuse me, excuse me,” Terrell said, as Muzia interjected and asked him to slow down and repeat himself. Terrell gave the address again.

Muzia also got his name and tried to ask more questions, but Terrell rambled, saying he beat the teen bloody and claiming the teen’s cousin robbed him at gunpoint. The teen could be heard crying in the background.

“Tell me when you’re done so that I can help you,” Muzia said.

“You say what?” he said.

“Let me know when you’re done ranting so I can ask the questions I need answered,” she said.

Terrell paused. Muzia asked more questions about the alleged robbery and Terrell's tone changed as he grew frustrated. Muzia asked if the teen bleeding needed an ambulance. Yes, he replied.

By that time, Muzia had entered the wrong address into the dispatch computer and coded it as a “subject with a gun” call, giving it a Priority 1, second only to an emergency assistance call from an officer.

With Terrell still on the line, she contacted the Fire Department, giving them the nonexistent address on North 10th Street. Terrell did not correct her.

“He need a lot a help. He need it all. He bleeding from every area,” Terrell said once the Fire Department was on the line with him.

At 3:06 p.m., dispatcher Pamela Krantz assigned the call to Officers Kurt Meyle and Mark Lindstrum, who were in separate squads. She sent them to the 10th Street address entered by Muzia.

Terrell grew agitated. He wanted police to come and arrest the teen he had beaten for the alleged robbery.

“I bet if I hang up the phone and said I’m finna kill this little boy,” Terrell said, as Muzia tried to interject. “Y’all ass gon be here in five seconds.”

“Bye I’m finna kill em,” he said.

Then he hung up, five minutes after the call began.

A dead cellphone, a nonexistent address

Emergency operators are trained to call back if a 911 caller hangs up.

But Muzia couldn’t do that because the cellphone Terrell used was either out of minutes or wasn’t contracted for service.

As a result, it couldn’t accept incoming calls and the only outgoing call it could make was to 911.

The officers went to North 10th Street and could not find the address. The first officer in the area, Meyle, asked for an update on the address. The dispatcher, Krantz, said she had none.

“OK, well, this address doesn’t exist and it looks like it’s coming from a dead cellphone,” Meyle told the dispatcher. “We’ll continue to check the area to see if someone flags us down.”

The two officers checked a vehicle parked in the street because the license plate included letters spelled similar to “Malik” and they knew the caller had identified himself as Malik Terrell. But the car was registered to someone with a different name.

The officers knocked at the door of the house closest to the nonexistent address. The owner allowed them inside and the officers saw no signs of blood or a struggle, Meyle told internal investigators.

The other officer, Lindstrum, provided a similar account to internal affairs.

The officers “cleared” the assignment after 30 minutes, telling the dispatcher they could not find the caller.

In an interview with internal affairs, Muzia said she’d typed what she thought the caller said: North 10th Street.

She repeated it to the Fire Department while connected with Terrell, and he did not correct her, she told investigators. Since Terrell had reported an armed robbery, she focused on getting a description of the person with a gun, Muzia said.

“I believe I responded appropriately,” she said.

A Milwaukee Police Department spokeswoman said Muzia, Krantz, Meyle and Lindstrum were unavailable for interviews. Internal affairs investigated the actions of all four at the request of a police supervisor and found only Muzia had violated department rules.

MPD policies clear on verifying address

The Milwaukee Police Department policy states: “It is absolutely essential to verify locations of reported incidents of a serious nature.”

If responding officers cannot find the caller, department members should check for data errors or misunderstandings and review the audio of the call.

That did not happen in this case.

The day of the call, no one told Muzia the officers couldn’t find the address, and the dispatcher didn’t ask her to check it, she told internal investigators.

Krantz said she and other dispatchers cannot listen back to 911 call playback at their workstations. She said if the officers would have specifically asked her to double-check the address, she would have sent a message to Muzia, the operator who took the call.

Emergency operators like Muzia also are required to "verbally verify locations, numbers and other significant information.”

Another 911 operator, an experienced trainer in the department, reviewed the call for internal affairs and found Muzia did not verbally verify the location with Terrell.

But Morales, in his statement, said Muzia heard the wrong address and repeated it “multiple times” to Terrell, a direct contradiction to the internal affairs reports.

“Unfortunately, the address she repeated was incorrect and MPD officers responded to the wrong location,” he said.

Lincoln, the victim’s mother, reviewed the records obtained by the Journal Sentinel and said it seemed like Terrell thought the operator did not believe what he was saying.

“When someone calls and tells you they have somebody hostage or they’re going to kill them, you take those calls serious,” she said. “ ...You have to take those things serious because now there’s a kid dead.”

Dennis was her only son and he left behind three sisters, ages 18, 12 and 5. Lincoln says her heart remains broken after his murder.

“I have so many unanswered questions and this was one of my questions: Why didn’t they make it to him in time?” she said.

“Now I know, somebody didn’t ask the right questions — the wrong address,” she said quietly.

She paused.

“I have a lot of what ifs — what if this, what if that — and things would be different.”

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Contact Ashley Luthern at ashley.luthern@jrn.com. Follow her on Twitter at @aluthern.