PROVO — Provo Mayor Lewis Billings adamantly denies attempting to cover up a botched 911 call that kept medical attention from reaching a 30-year-old man before he died in October.

But Scott Aston's family wants Billings to turn over information that could either confirm or disprove their concerns that Provo police and city officials hid the existence of the call after Aston's body was found.

For seven weeks, Mike and Alice Aston thought their son fell asleep watching television on the floor of his apartment and passed away peacefully. Then Billings called them Nov. 29 and told them Scott Aston called 911 for help, only to have a dispatcher mishear his address and commit errors that prevented an ambulance from finding him.

The dispatcher didn't hear Aston's address correctly. Aston lived at 915 N. 500 West. Emergency personnel were sent to 950 N. 500 West, a nonexistent address.

They called off the search when a home or apartment couldn't be found. Aston's body was found four days later when his family, concerned he hadn't been seen or answered phone calls for several days, called police to help them forcibly enter his apartment.

Members of Aston's family believe Billings told them about the call only because they were going to find out when they received copies of a medical examiner's report and the police records about Aston's death, which they had requested.

"I don't think Lewis Billings would have made that call if we hadn't asked for that police report," said Dale Aston, a brother.

Billings denies the charge. He said that once the police department tied the discovery of Aston's body to the 911 call four days earlier, city administrators resolved to investigate any errors. They decided not to tell the family anything until they knew as much as they could, then they would lay out all the information for the family to dissect.

"When we first learned about this the question was: 'What are all of the facts?' " Billings said. "We certainly were not going to tell anyone anything without all the facts. We started an internal review, and we tried to move as quickly as we could."

He said confusion dominated the first weeks of the investigation. Nothing similar had ever happened with Provo's dispatch center.

"To be honest," he added, "I'm not sure I believed at first that this is what had happened."

Billings said he wanted to wait for the completion of the autopsy, an internal investigation and an external review by the Ogden Police Department. Then, he wanted to determine if disciplinary action was warranted against the two dispatchers involved in the mishandled call.

Finally, he wanted to be certain new procedures were in place in Provo's dispatch center.