BALTIMORE - Anne Arundel County can't be sued for botching an emergency call about a Glen Burnie woman's 2001 killing because 911 operators and police have no legal duty to help someone being abducted, assaulted or murdered, a county lawyer told a federal judge Monday.

The family of Yvette Beakes, however, said she might still be alive if a 911 dispatcher had told officers about the 26-year-old pharmacist's kidnapping or passed along an eyewitness' description of her abductors' van.

"I think my sister could have been saved," her older brother, Jason Beakes, said in an interview Monday. "We'll never know for sure."

The...