Months before a man died following a computer-aided dispatch system outage, a Baltimore official warned that the ailing emergency communications network, which routes 911 calls to police and fire dispatchers and is known as CAD, was prone to freeze-ups and outages.
“It’s in dire need of replacement,” Todd Carter, then the city’s IT director, told Baltimore’s planning commission during a budget hearing in January.
Five months later, on June 24, 31-year-old Dontae Melton Jr. died after Baltimore Police repeatedly requested medics who never arrived because of a CAD outage. The officers took Melton to a hospital, where he eventually died. Last week, his death was ruled a homicide…