A Queens man was charged with attempted assault on Friday for wielding a knife at police officers during an episode last month that ended with him being shot.
The man, Jabez Chakraborty, 22, was arraigned on Friday afternoon, appearing virtually from a Queens hospital, where he has been since the shooting on Jan. 26. During the chaotic, seconds-long encounter, a police officer who responded to a 911 call shot Mr. Chakraborty inside his family’s home in the Briarwood section of Queens after he approached the officers with a kitchen knife. The shooting — and the charges on Friday — have stoked a long-running debate about how the city should handle mental health emergencies.
A grand jury indicted Mr. Chakraborty on charges of attempted assault and criminal possession of a weapon. The shooting is being investigated by the Police Department’s Force Investigation Division, which handles violent encounters between the police and civilians.
Mr. Chakraborty’s family has insisted that they called 911 for medical help and had wanted an ambulance to take him to the hospital. They have disputed portions of the police officer’s account of the shooting and have asked Melinda Katz, the Queens district attorney, not to pursue charges against Mr. Chakraborty, who suffers from schizophrenia. Mayor Zohran Mamdani has joined the family in that call, saying on multiple occasions that he does not believe Mr. Chakraborty should be prosecuted.
On Friday, Mr. Mamdani said that Mr. Chakraborty’s “handcuffs should be removed” and that he should receive “the care that he needs.”
In a statement after the arraignment, Julie Chakraborty, Mr. Chakraborty’s mother, said her son had been “unjustly charged.” “Hasn’t he suffered enough?” she wrote. “Locking him up will destroy his life. All we want is for him to be able to heal.”
Video of the shooting, which was captured by the body-worn camera of Tyree White, the officer who fired his gun, shows him shooting Mr. Chakraborty amid a chaotic and quickly escalating scene.
The episode began just before 10:30 a.m., when a member of Mr. Chakraborty’s family called 911 to request help, saying that Mr. Chakraborty had begun throwing glass inside their family home.
Body camera footage shows Officer White and a second officer arriving later that morning at the home. The two are let into the house by a woman and once they enter, footage shows Mr. Chakraborty grabbing a large knife from the kitchen. He then advances toward the officers as the woman tries to hold him back, and Officer White tells him repeatedly to drop the knife.
At this point, Mr. Chakraborty flipped the blade upside down and wound his right arm back, prosecutors said. Gripping the knife, he then continues to advance, eventually pushing through a glass-paneled door between the living room and the vestibule where the officers were standing, according to prosecutors and the footage.
Officer White then fires his gun four times, striking Mr. Chakraborty, who falls onto a couch. Mr. Chakraborty was taken to the hospital, where he underwent surgery and remained on Friday.
The Legal Aid Society, which is representing Mr. Chakraborty, said that since the shooting he has been kept shackled to his hospital bed and his family has been “closely monitored” by police officers, compounding the trauma they had experienced.
“We agree with Mayor Mamdani that Mr. Chakraborty should be receiving mental health care, not prosecution,” the lawyers representing him said. “He will carry the pain, suffering and lasting trauma of these injuries for the rest of his life.”
The shooting has posed something of a political tightrope walk for Mr. Mamdani as he seeks to deliver on a campaign promise to change how the city handles 911 calls for mental health crises. He has had to moderate his response to chaotic events without angering the city’s police force or alienating his progressive allies who feel that officers are not equipped to handle such cases.
Mr. Mamdani faced criticism from some of those allies who believed he had not sufficiently acknowledged the grief felt by Mr. Chakraborty’s family in his initial statement after the shooting. But on Friday, the mayor said he remained committed to building a mental health response system that better addressed the needs of those in distress.
Maia Coleman is a reporter for The Times covering the New York Police Department and criminal justice in the New York area.
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