ROBERT ECKHART, Sarasota Herald Tribune (Florida)

CHARLOTTE COUNTY: Former dispatcher Susan Kirby Kallestad is the only sheriff’s employee to admit she could have done more to help Denise Amber Lee, a young mother who was abducted from her home, raped and then murdered in 2008.

Kallestad, 60, dabbed at tears Thursday as she testified in court that she failed to pass on crucial information to a co-worker about a suspicious dark-colored Camaro. A witness spotted the Camaro at U.S. 41 and Toledo Blade Boulevard about 6:33 p.m., with a screaming person in the back.

“I am a self-critiquer and I didn’t tell Brandy that information,” said Kallestad, who first confessed her mistake in a 4:30 a.m. phone call to her supervisor two days later, as search crews continued to hunt for Lee. “It was eating me up.”

In the end, nobody dispatched a patrol car to find the suspicious Camaro, which was being driven by Michael King. Lee was in the back seat, bound and blindfolded.

That lapse is at the center of the wrongful death lawsuit filed by Lee’s widower against the sheriff’s office. Later that evening Lee, 21, was shot and killed less than five miles from the U.S. 41-Toledo Blade intersection. King was convicted and sentenced to death for the murder.

But while Kallestad accepts some of the blame, she also says that 911 call taker Mildred Stepp made “inexcusable” mistakes that night. And a third sheriff’s employee who was suspended for 36 hours for policy violations during the search, Liz Martinez, admits no wrongdoing.

It will be up to jurors to sift through the testimony of those three former 911 center employees as they determine whether the Charlotte County Sheriff’s Office bears responsibility for Lee’s death.

Stepp, who also testified Thursday, says she knew instantly that the person screaming in the back of the Camaro was the missing woman.

Everybody in the call center knew that Lee — the daughter of Charlotte County sheriff’s Sgt. Rick Goff — had been reported missing from her North Port home, and that a be-on-the-lookout advisory had been issued for a green Camaro.

Stepp said she stood up in her cubicle to tell the dispatchers on duty, Kallestad and Martinez, that she had a caller on the line with information about the car.

But Stepp did not type that into the computer-aided dispatch system. Instead, she told Kallestad what was happening, and wrote it down on a note that she passed to Kallestad and Martinez. Stepp said she didn’t want to wait to type it in.

“I wanted to get an officer out there,” Stepp told the jury.

The other dispatchers told her she needed to “put in a call” by typing it into the computer system, not passing notes.

“She brings over this piece of paper and I don’t read it,” Kallestad told the jury. “Put in a call, because that’s the way the process works.”

Stepp did not type the information into her computer until 6:42 — 12 minutes after she had answered. And the call was lost in the shuffle of a 6:45 p.m. shift change.

Kallestad later called Stepp’s delay “inexcusable” in a letter to the sheriff. Stepp was counseled, but not disciplined.

Sheriff’s attorneys pointed out in court Thursday that a be-on-the-lookout for a green Camaro was issued at 6:36 p.m., based on an earlier 911 call to North Port. So deputies should have been looking for a similar car in the same vicinity.

But King’s car went undetected.

Martinez and several other former 911 center employees are scheduled to testify today.

Martinez acknowledges she was disciplined for making a mistake and does not dispute that, but she has never accepted blame, saying in pretrial depositions that it was not her fault: “I think I did to the best of my ability,” she said.

Copyright © 2012 LexisNexis, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All Rights Reserved.