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Darlene Dukes was struggling to breathe when she called 911 on a Saturday afternoon in August 2008. An ambulance did not reach her Johns Creek apartment for nearly an hour, after a Fulton County operator misheard her street name and sent crews toward a road more than 25 miles away. Dukes, 39, died soon afterward.

She phoned the county 911 center at 1:01 p.m. on Aug. 2, 2008, according to Fulton County officials. Dukes lived at 305 Wales Drive in Johns Creek, an affluent suburb north of Atlanta, but the operator who took the call understood the address as Wells Street, a road in the city to the south. Crews were sent there and found no one.

The operator's screen showed the call had come from a cell tower in north Fulton County, officials said, a detail that did not match the Atlanta address but was not reconciled. Dukes, who was in respiratory distress, fell silent about 17 minutes into the call. The operator spent roughly eight more minutes trying to get her to respond before the error was caught.

Johns Creek police were notified about 25 minutes after the initial call and reached the apartment within three minutes, authorities said. Officers and firefighters found Dukes unconscious and began CPR. A Rural Metro ambulance arrived at 2:01 p.m., about an hour after she first dialed. She was taken to Emory Johns Creek Hospital, where she died shortly after 3 p.m. Her parents were told the cause was a pulmonary embolism, a blood clot in the lungs. She was the mother of two sons.

County officials said a typical response would have taken 8 to 10 minutes. The operator, identified as Gina Conteh, was fired the following week. Her personnel file, reviewed after the death, listed years of reprimands and suspensions, prior mishandled calls and sleeping on duty, according to county records cited in news accounts.

On Aug. 14, 2008, County Manager Zachary Williams stripped 911 director Alfred "Rocky" Moore of direct control over the emergency communications center and ordered an outside audit of its operations. Moore's deputy took over the center.

Conteh later pushed back. In a lawsuit filed Sept. 11, 2010, she sought $10.5 million from the county, Moore and three other employees, arguing she had been made a scapegoat. Her attorney said she had been placed in an advanced dispatcher role she was not qualified for, had worked long consecutive shifts before the call, and that dispatch procedures had changed the day before the error occurred. County Commissioner Robb Pitts said the county had followed its procedures and would fight the suit.