Local law enforcement and a cellular phone provider are addressing a problem that hindered police from getting to the Vicksburg family being held by jail escapee Rafael McCloud.

McCloud, 34, was killed March 10 after breaking into a house on Fort Hill Drive and holding a family hostage. He was killed after the wife was able to leave the bathroom where they were being held and got a gun. She and her husband shot McCloud, who died in the tub of the bathroom.

Early in their ordeal, the couple was able to make calls to 911 twice, but the calls never reached the Vicksburg-Warren 911 Communications Center. Instead, they went to Madison Parish, La. 911.

The reason, Vicksburg-Warren and Madison Parish E911 officials said, was because Verizon Wireless programmed the wrong emergency service number into a repeater in Warren County.

The emergency service number, or ESN, Tate said, is a number wireless phone companies program into their systems to send 911 emergency calls to certain public safety answering points, or PSAP.

“The Verizon tower on Castle Hill was programmed so any (911) calls it received went to the Madison Parish 911 Center in Tallulah,” Vicksburg-Warren County 911 director Chuck Tate said. “So Verizon customers who hit that tower had their (911) calls answered by the Madison Parish Sheriff’s Office.”

Randy Yalung, of Safety and Security Technologies, a contractor for Verizon that programs the call routes for this area, said the problem has been corrected.

Tate and Madison Parish 911 director Cynthia Machen said officials in Louisiana did not realize the error until just recently.

“We didn’t know there was a problem until last week,” Machen said. “Just every now and then we will get Mississippi calls and we’ll just route them back over there, and they get some of ours; that’s kind of a normal thing.”

She said Madison County dispatchers began noticing about three weeks ago they were getting more 911 calls than usual from Warren County. “That’s when we began to think something got switched or rerouted that way.

“We get calls from all over. The dispatcher didn’t know it was from that particular tower until a few weeks ago,” she said.

According to Madison Parish 911 Center records the couple called twice early in the hostage taking, at 4:15 and 4:22 a.m., but officials did not know they were routed to Madison Parish until later.

Machen said the dispatcher recorded them as nuisance calls because she could not get any response from the callers. And Madison Parish officials didn’t realize the calls came from the couple until after their ordeal was over and McCloud was dead.

When the emergency calls came from the couple, Machen said, the call’s area code gave no indication where it was coming from. The only information they had was the cell call was relayed from the Castle Hill tower in Warren County.

“We had no way of knowing that call came from Vicksburg, except that it hit that tower. It could have come from Louisiana and hit that tower. There was no way my dispatcher knew it was coming from Vicksburg.

“It really didn’t alert us at the time, because so many people call us with nuisance calls,” she said. “They hang up, and that’s basically what we thought it was, until we were told we may have gotten a call. That’s when we started listening.”

Only after they enhanced the recording and played it back did Madison Parish officials realized it was the couple calling for help.

Tate said it is not unusual for someone living in an area to carry a cell phone with a different area code from where they live. When a cell phone call comes in to 911, he said, the computer indicates a phone number and gives the dispatcher the location of the tower.

“It shows a phone number, but with everybody these days moving around, taking their old numbers with them, and call shows a different area code that may or may not be (a) local (call),” Tate said.

Had the call come to the Vicksburg-Warren 911 Center, Vicksburg Police Chief Walter Armstrong said, officers would have responded regardless if the dispatcher could talk to someone.

Armstrong, a member of the 911 Commission, said he plans to ask if there is anything 911 can do to eliminate or reduce the problem of wrongly routed calls.