It happened in five seconds. A police officer fired two shots at a 32-year-old man carrying a knife in a brightly lit hallway of a South Bronx building on Sunday evening, striking him in the torso.
The man, whom the police have not identified, was in stable condition and was expected to survive.
The police said he had called 911 to report an attempted burglary and was on the first floor of the apartment building on East 148th Street in the Mott Haven neighborhood when two officers entered the building, according to police officials and footage of the shooting, captured on a Ring camera.
What happened next — including whether a language barrier played a role in the shooting — is still under investigation, said Deputy Chief Rohan D. Griffith, who spoke about the incident at a news conference on Sunday night.
The man had dialed 911 to report that a person in an alley outside the building had attempted to steal his window air-conditioner, police officials said. Chief Griffith confirmed that there was a man in the alley close to the air-conditioner, but could not yet say whether an attempted burglary took place.
Right before the officer fired her gun, the man called out several words in Spanish, according to the video and Chief Griffith, who said the incident was also captured on the officers’ body worn cameras. It was unclear from the video what the man said.
“When he called 911, he spoke Spanish, and an interpreter was used for the call. We have to ascertain if the officers themselves understood what he was saying, and vice versa,” said Chief Griffith, the head of the Police Department’s Force Investigation Division, which analyzes cases where an officer uses his or her firearm.
“We have to take a deep dive into this,” he added. “This is very early on in the investigation.”
The incident started around 5:30 p.m. on Sunday, when officers arrived to answer the call about the air-conditioner.
Upon entering the building, the officers, both women, briefly walked up to the second floor to look for the man who had dialed 911, Chief Griffith said. The man had gone into the alleyway, “presumably to investigate himself as to what was going on,” he said.
Unable to find him, the officers walked back down the staircase, and at that moment, the man approached them with a knife in his right hand, Chief Griffith said.
The man — who is never captured on camera — called out the words in Spanish, according to the video and Chief Griffith.
In the video, one of the officers screams, “Wait, wait!” Then, she shrieks again: “Wait!”
The same officer then ordered the man to drop the knife, and held up her hand, indicating that the man should stop, Chief Griffith said.
But the man “continued to swiftly approach the officers, still with the knife in his right hand,” he said.
Two seconds later, the officers walk backward the way they came, toward the front door of the building. Their knees are bent and their guns are pointed toward the man, the video shows. The officer who ordered the man to wait fires two shots, their deafening explosions ringing out in the hallway.
Seven seconds after she pulls the trigger, the officer’s jaw drops, seemingly in disbelief. She calls out again for the man to wait, and raises her gun again. In her left hand is a police radio. She screams, “Shots fired! Shots fired!”
Two other officers rush through the front door of the building, their guns out for a moment before they holster them. The officer who shot the man yells into her radio again. “I need an ambulance!” she says, before sprinting toward the front door as the other officers tend to the victim.
“Oh, my God,” she says.
The officer continues to call out: “They’re on their way,” she says to her colleagues. Then, to the dispatcher on the radio, she yells again. “I have one male shot, I need you to rush the bus!”
Emergency medical workers took the man to Lincoln Hospital, Chief Griffith said.
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