The widow of a Sheffield Village police lieutenant has filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Lorain County 911 dispatchers, alleging that a malfunctioning alert system delayed emergency responders to her husband's home while he suffered cardiac arrest. Kaitlin Bober called 911 after her husband, 43-year-old Lt. Aaron Bober, went into cardiac arrest at 7:27 a.m. on November 21, 2025, and she began CPR while waiting for help to arrive. He was later transported to a hospital, where he died.
The lawsuit, filed in Lorain County Common Pleas Court, was reported by FOX 8 News, and names multiple Lorain County 911 dispatchers as defendants. According to the suit, the county's automated alert system sent only silent alerts that were never received by responders, even though 911 officials allegedly knew for more than an hour before Bober's emergency that the system was not functioning properly. Kurt Scholl serves as Lorain County 911 Director, according to the same report.
Brian Balser, the attorney representing Bober's widow, said Bober's death was preventable, telling the outlet that ventricular fibrillation, the condition Bober suffered, is treatable with proper care. Balser said the 911 system failure caused a deadly delay and more than doubled the response time to the Bober home. “Lorain County 911 used a system it knew was not working,” Balser said, per the station's report.
Fire Crews Had to Radio Dispatch to Confirm the Call Was Real
The response-time gap Balser describes lines up with details reported separately by The Chronicle-Telegram in December 2025. Emergency call records showed Sheffield Fire paramedics arrived at the Bober home 11 minutes and 56 seconds after Kaitlin Bober's 7:27 a.m. call, and firefighters only realized something was wrong after they noticed a delay and radioed dispatch themselves, 1 minute and 38 seconds into the incident, to confirm there was an active emergency at all.
Sheffield Fire Chief Scott Gilles told the Chronicle-Telegram that the dispatch software outage pushed his department's response time to 4 minutes and 32 seconds after firefighters manually dispatched themselves, compared with a standard response time of 1 to 1.5 minutes when the system works properly. The paper identified the technology behind the failure as automated dispatch software made by Locution Systems Inc., which is designed to broadcast automated voice alerts over station speakers and radio channels whenever dispatchers log calls into the county's computer-aided dispatch system.
911 Director Says Dashboard Showed the System Running Fine
Scholl told the newspaper that dispatchers did not immediately catch the failure because the Locution software displayed as running normally on their monitors. FOX 8 News reported that it requested comment from Lorain County 911 for its story but did not receive a response.
Aaron Bober was described in his official obituary from Dovin Funeral & Cremation Specialists as a devoted family man who loved serving the public. He started with the Sheffield Village Police Department in 2004, according to the obituary.
A County 911 System Already Under Fire
Bober's death and the resulting lawsuit land amid a broader, ongoing power struggle over who controls Lorain County's 911 operations. In March 2026, Lorain County Sheriff Jack Hall sued the Lorain County Board of Commissioners in Common Pleas Court, claiming commissioners had refused to allow audits of the 911 center and had jeopardized public safety, according to WKYC. Weeks later, on April 30, 2026, deputies with the sheriff's office Public Corruption Unit executed search warrants at the 911 dispatch center and the county administration building as part of a criminal investigation into alleged fraud tied to 911 vendor contracts, a raid Hoodline covered in its own report at the time.
That fight escalated further in mid-June 2026, when IT contractor B4 Health Management filed a federal lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Cleveland alleging that Sheriff Hall's criminal probe and the April raid were part of an effort to strip 911 operations away from county commissioners, as reported by the Chronicle-Telegram. Separately, Hoodline reported in June on Lorain County's emergency communications.
The Legal Hurdle Ahead
The lawsuit's legal issues will include whether Lorain County 911 dispatchers can be held responsible for the alleged delay. The suit centers on allegations about the county's emergency response when Bober suffered cardiac arrest.
