Last Friday night, Elsie Grier was sitting on the couch watching "Jeopardy!" at her daughter's house in Queens when she thought she heard her husband, Jasper Grier, stumble and fall in the next room. She went to the dining room and found him collapsed on the floor, she said.

For the next half-hour, she and several relatives frantically dialed 911, but the line was busy and they could not get through. Only after Mrs. Grier's sister drove to a local firehouse did an emergency medical team arrive. Mr. Grier, 77, was in cardiac arrest when he reached Long Island Jewish Medical Center and died shortly afterward, a hospital spokeswoman said.

Mrs. Grier and her relatives now say they believe that he might still be alive if not for a breakdown in the city's 911 system caused by a problem with the telephone company, Verizon. The breakdown affected Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island for about two hours on Friday night. 

"When we needed them, they weren't there," said Mr. Grier's daughter, Leonie Marshall, who owns the house where her father collapsed on 223rd Street in Queens Village. "It's a big mistake, a big loss."

Many heart attack patients die after even the fastest responses, and there is no way to say whether the family's beliefs are justified.

Yesterday, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said it appeared that from the time the city was notified that the family needed help, "the response time by the fire engine and by the E.M.S. ambulance were perfectly acceptable." A Fire Department spokesman said the response time was six minutes, faster than the citywide average.

Mr. Grier and his wife moved to the United States from Jamaica last August and were planning a retirement in Queens, where four of their seven children live, along with five grandchildren, Mrs. Marshall said.

"We wonder if we did the right thing to bring him here," Mrs. Marshall said, as she leafed through photographs of her father in Jamaica.

Before moving to Queens, Mr. Grier grew yams and cocoa in Jamaica, Mrs. Marshall said. He was also a minister at the Church of God in Prophecy in Alderton and a justice of the peace, she added. 

Mrs. Grier said she planned to take her husband's body back to Jamaica for his funeral.

"I put God in front, but he's the source of my living," she said of her husband.