[chris]

A Cincinnati mother was trailing the estranged husband who had just torn their 18-month-old daughter from her arms when a 911 dispatcher told her to break off the chase and go home. Two days later the girl was found beaten to death.

The abduction happened in October 2005, when Lynetta Myrick's estranged husband seized the youngest of the couple's three children at the family's home, threatened to hurt her and fled on foot, according to a case study in the Journal of Emergency Dispatch and later court records. A neighbor who heard Myrick screaming called 911 and gave a call-taker the address and a description of the man.

Myrick placed her own call from a cellphone, but the connection dropped. A neighbor offered to drive her after her husband, and she reached 911 again from the moving car. The dispatcher told her to either pull over or return home and wait for officers to respond. She turned back.

That was the last time she saw her daughter alive. Investigators found the body of the girl, Aliyah, two days later. Authorities said she had died of blunt force trauma inflicted by her father.

The call troubled William Hinkle, then the director of Hamilton County's communications department in greater Cincinnati. "There was no reason that child should have died," Hinkle later said. "I couldn't believe it when I listened to the call." He ordered a review of every policy affecting the safety of children and went on to run a call-center project for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

Myrick sued the city and the dispatcher, arguing that the instruction to abandon the pursuit had cost her daughter's life. Ohio's First District Court of Appeals rejected the claim in a 2-1 decision in late 2008, holding that the city and its employee were entitled to governmental immunity. The dispatcher's advice to pull over or go home, the majority found, did not amount to the willful and wanton misconduct needed to strip away that protection.