Woman Was Killed As Deputies Lagged Officers’ Response To 911 Call Took 34 Minutes, Not Usual Nine

It took 34 minutes for a deputy to reach the scene after a frantic 911 caller said “the same guy that cut that girl’s arms off” in California was beating a woman, the sheriff acknowledged on Friday.

By the time the deputy was able to confront Lawrence Singleton on Wednesday night, the rapist’s face and chest were covered with blood and the lifeless body of 31-year-old Roxanne Hayes lay on his living room floor.

“We were slow to get there,” Sheriff Cal Henderson said. “It was shift change time. It was the rush hour traffic time. And when the call initially went out, there were no deputies available to handle that call.”

Singleton, convicted two decades ago in California of raping a teenage hitchhiker and chopping off her forearms, appeared in court Friday charged with first-degree murder. No bail was set.

The slaying - which came nine days after Singleton was released from a psychiatric hospital after attempting suicide - has raised questions about the police response time, why Singleton was not under police watch in Florida, and why neighbors weren’t notified of his violent past.

“Do I wish we could have gotten there in nine minutes? Yes. Do I think it would have changed anything? No,” Henderson said. “I don’t think it would have changed the outcome of this if we had a deputy one block away.”

Henderson said the dispatcher did not know who Singleton was and did not pass the information on to the deputy who responded. The department’s average response time to emergency calls is 9.1 minutes, he said.

“Listen, we just went up to a house,” the caller told the dispatcher. “And we went up to the house and there was this guy inside this house and he was beating this woman inside the house.”

Later, he said: “OK, now I don’t know what the deal is, but … the person that lives in that house is the same guy that cut that girl’s arms off, that 15-year-old in California.”

The woman died from six stab wounds to the upper chest, including one directly to her heart and another that severed her liver, the sheriff said. The murder weapon, apparently, was a 6-inch boning knife.

Residents of Singleton’s bluecollar neighborhood weren’t notified of Singleton’s violent criminal past because he didn’t fit the legal criteria of Florida’s Sexual Predator Law, covering crimes after the law took effect in 1995.

Singleton registered in Florida as a known felon when he moved back to his home state in 1988, after the terms of his parole expired.

Singleton was no stranger to Tampa’s criminal justice system.

He was jailed twice for shoplifting in 1990.