By Jason Nark
The Philadelphia Daily News
PHILADELPHIA — A tape of the 9-1-1 call made from a Camden County townhouse where a 20-year-old Arkansas woman died July 11 features crackling static, a long gap of silence and shock in the voices from the home.
After asking for an ambulance, a woman in the home, at 432 Loch Lomond Drive, Gloucester Township, asks the police dispatcher to hold on. About 45 seconds later, an unidentified man gets on the phone.
“We had a visitor come to our house,” the man says on the tape, which was made available to the Daily News yesterday. “She was sleeping in a room, and we didn’t hear nothing from her. Now we just go upstairs to wake her up to eat, and she’s dead.”
Authorities are awaiting toxicology results to determine how Lucille Marie Hamilton, a male-to-female transgender woman, died inside the home of Hector Salva, a self-proclaimed voodoo priest. Authorities say that Hamilton had paid to undergo a three-day spiritual cleansing there, referred to on Salva’s Gade Nou Leve Web site as “Lave Tet.”
The Camden County Prosecutor’s Office has not called the death suspicious, and no charges have been filed. According to Billie Miller, a friend and co-worker of Hamilton’s, Salva told Hamilton’s mother that she had “not taken anything nor drank anything.”
Later in the three-minute 9-1-1 call, the man puts his “wife” on the phone.
Asked by the dispatcher when Hamilton was last seen alive, the woman repeats the questions to others in the house.
“About two hours ago,” she tells the dispatcher. “About two-and-a-half, three hours ago.”
The woman also says that she had tried to start CPR.
Meanwhile, an online video memorial set to the sounds of “Ave Maria” features images of Hamilton as a fair-haired little boy unwrapping Christmas presents, as a long-haired high-school graduate posing with her mother — and, finally, as the woman she had proudly become. It can be seen at www.rollerfuneralhomes.com.
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