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A family in Tennessee is still mourning the loss of their loved one after he went down in a hail of bullets during a 911 call that was never answered by police. The man’s family contends that if police responded to his call that he may have not died and his assailants would’ve been arrested.

Lorenzen Wright was an NBA player with several teams during his 13-year career.  He had retired from the Cleveland Cavaliers only one year before he was murdered.  His body was found on the side of a road 10 days after he went missing and according to his family, 911 calls from his cell phone were ignored by the dispatcher, so police never arrived at the scene. The awful details of the night could be heard on the dispatcher’s audiotape, but Wright’s last moments were discounted and muted forever.

The choice the dispatcher made cost Wright his life and now the family is seeking justice. According to the Huffington Post, “The 911 operator heard a man’s garbled voice, an expletive, then as many as ten gunshots. Then silence.”  His mother, Deborah Marion, filed a federal lawsuit on Tuesday citing that the “call for help represented a violation of his civil rights and crippled the investigation into his murder.”

The dispatcher was disconnected on the intial call, but re-dialed the number which the dispatcher discovered was outside the Memphis jurisdiction.  Police were never dispatched to the scene.  His badly decomposed body was found in the woods not far from the tower that registered his last call.

Read more here.RIP Lorenzen Wright.