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A South Florida woman who dialed 911 as she fled an armed man was shot to death in the parking lot of the police station she raced to for safety, and the gunman then killed himself. The shooting happened on April 25, 2008, outside the Plantation Police Department in Broward County.

Olidia Kerr Day, 45, drove about a mile from her home to the station at 451 NW 70th Terrace with Carlos Cevallos, 48, of Pembroke Pines, following in a separate car, according to police accounts and news reports. Cevallos shot Day before she could reach the building's lobby, then turned the gun on himself. Both died.

Day placed the call from her cellphone. It was first answered by a dispatcher in neighboring Sunrise and transferred to a Plantation call-taker later identified in news reports as Rebecca Prieto. 'He's got me at gunpoint and shooting, shooting at me,' Day said, naming Cevallos and describing her blue Honda Accord. The call ran 3 minutes and 24 seconds and ended with screaming in the background and a report of shots fired.

Neither dispatcher was able to pinpoint Day's location from her cellphone, and at one point the Plantation call-taker told her, 'Stop yelling because I can't help you if you're yelling.' Day's relatives and emergency-dispatch consultants who reviewed the recording said the handling wasted precious seconds, with one consultant saying Day should have been urged to keep driving rather than stop.

The dispatcher who took the Plantation portion of the call had a troubled personnel history. She had been suspended for 10 days without pay in May 2007 for using a racial slur at work, and Police Chief Larry Massey had recommended firing her at the time, according to records cited by news outlets. Plantation officials initially defended the response, with a department spokesman saying the dispatcher did fine.

Day had met Cevallos weeks earlier at a supermarket where he worked as a meat clerk and had hired him for handyman jobs, relatives told reporters. They said Cevallos wanted a romantic relationship she did not, and that he had frightened her by claiming to have a gun. On the night of the killing, they said, he pushed his way into her home, and she got him back outside by telling him in Spanish they could talk away from her children before she broke for her car.

The case drew national attention. Day's family appeared on a December 2008 episode of the 'Dr. Phil' show devoted to failures in the 911 system.