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Ward 7 D.C. Council member Yvette Alexander was held at gunpoint while trying to help a robbery victim in Southeast Washington on Jan. 20, then questioned a 911 response that took about 10 minutes to bring an officer to the scene.

Alexander was driving through her neighborhood when she saw a man lying facedown on the sidewalk with two others standing over him. She stopped her SUV to ask if he needed help, but one man walked toward the front of her vehicle while the other came to the passenger side with a silver handgun and told her, "Keep it moving."

Alexander drove off and called 911, telling the dispatcher, "Someone accosted me at gunpoint," and that she did not know whether the man on the sidewalk had been killed. The victim, a MetroAccess paratransit driver, had stepped outside his vehicle in the 3400 block of Highwood Drive SE to talk with his dispatcher when he was robbed of $30 in cash, other items from his wallet and a radio, according to a police report.

One of the men had ordered the driver to the ground at gunpoint before Alexander drove up. The driver got to his feet once the pair fled and made his own 911 call three minutes after Alexander's; on that recording, she can be heard in the background reacting to the continued absence of police.

City records show the first call was answered in five seconds but not dispatched for 157 seconds, missing the Office of Unified Communications' 120-second target, according to Mafara Hobson, a spokeswoman for Mayor Adrian M. Fenty. Eight minutes passed before a fire crew reached the scene, ahead of the police cruiser that followed; it took about 10 minutes in all for an officer to arrive, compared with a citywide average of 7 minutes 14 seconds for similar priority calls. Alexander said the responding officer told her he believed he had been sent to check on an unconscious person, not a robbery in progress.

Council member Phil Mendelson, chairman of the Committee on Public Safety and the Judiciary, said the delay probably helped the robbers get away and that he wanted more information from police, though he said he was not calling for anyone to be fired. Alexander said she was weighing a public hearing on the city's emergency response system.

The two suspects, their faces partly covered with scarves, were not publicly identified and remained at large. Alexander waited several days to discuss the robbery, at her staff's urging, because the men had not been caught.