BELMONT, N.C. -- A grandmother died when two armed men broke into her home. Now, the county is doing something that family members say would have prevented her death.

Mary Parnell, 79, was home alone on Sept. 26, 2008. She never knew police were searching her neighborhood in Belmont for two armed robbery suspects.

At Gaston County's Emergency Management Office, Director Tommy Almond tried to send out a reverse 911 call to warn the neighborhood. The system crashed.

"We activated the machine and it shut down after two minutes," Almond said.

The calls never went out, even after a complete reboot of the system.

Back at Parnell's house, one of the suspects allegedly got in. When Parnell saw him, prosecutors say she was literally scared to death and died of a heart attack.

Her son-in-law says if the call system had worked, "She would have been forewarned and we would have celebrated Christmas with her."

David Hains says instead the family gathered on Christmas to put flowers on her grave.

"I guess there wasn't a backup system, a plan B in the event the technology-based system failed," he said.

Now, Gaston County is rolling out its new call system to replace the one that failed. It is a system called CityWatch and is used by 30 other North Carolina counties. Where the old system could place 700 calls in an hour, CityWatch can call 20,000 homes in an hour. Later this year it will also be able to dial cell phones that many now use in place of traditional home phones.

It is too late for the family of Mary Parnell, but her son-in-law says he hopes if the new system ever goes down, that there is some other plan like going door-to-door or using police sirens to give neighbors some kind of alert.

"The police are doing the best they can," he said, "but we all need to think of plan Bs."