The New York City police fatally shot a man inside a Brooklyn hospital on Thursday after he cut himself with a crude blade, threatened to cut and kill others and barricaded himself in a blood-spattered room with a patient and a security guard, officials said.
The man, whom the police did not identify beyond saying that he was in his early 60s, had checked into the hospital on Wednesday, officials said at a news conference on Thursday night.
It was unclear how he came to have the unusual-looking weapon he was brandishing, which did not resemble a typical knife, the police said.
“That is still under investigation,” Assistant Chief Charles Minch said at the news conference.
Chief Minch gave the following account of the events before the shooting:
At about 5:30 p.m., the police received several 911 calls about a violent man with a knife inside the hospital, NewYork-Presbyterian Brooklyn Methodist Hospital in the Park Slope neighborhood.
The callers reported that the man had barricaded himself in a room, had cut himself and was threatening to cut others. Members of the hospital staff reported that he had also threatened to kill them.
Officers responding to the hospital went to the eighth floor, where they were met by doctors, nurses and security staff members who directed them to the room where the scene was unfolding.
When they got to the room, Chief Minch said, the officers saw “blood all over” the walls and floor and “splattered across the exterior of the door.”
The man came into the doorway and displayed the bloody weapon, and the officers spent the next several minutes ordering him repeatedly to drop it. He refused their commands and tried several times to close the door with the patient, who was in his 70s, and the security guard, who was in his 50s, inside.
Managing to keep the door open, the officers simultaneously fired a Taser and a gun at the man. Neither succeeded in subduing him.
The man again moved toward the officers, and again, after more orders to drop the weapon, they fired Tasers at him. When that failed to stop him, they shot him with their guns. Chief Minch did not say how many shots were fired. The man was pronounced dead a short time later.
The man did not appear to have any relationship to the people in the room with him, the chief said, adding that the investigation was continuing.
“This situation could have turned out very differently,” Chief Minch said.
A hospital spokeswoman declined to comment.
About an hour after the shooting, at least a dozen emergency vehicles filled the streets around the hospital, and the police had shut down the block near the building’s main entrance on Sixth Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues. Helicopters thumped overhead.
At one point, at least a half-dozen members of the Police Department’s counterterrorism unit stood guard outside as people came in and out. Some of those leaving the building said they did not know exactly what had happened.
John Brown, who lives in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights neighborhood and works in catering, exited at about 7:30 p.m. He said had been receiving dialysis treatment when he began to get text messages from concerned friends who had heard about an episode at the hospital.
Mr. Brown, 34, said he had “heard a bang” as he went down a staircase to leave the building. When he got to the lobby, he discovered that it had been locked down. Hospital staff members told him to “stay put and wait,” he said, adding that everyone had remained “pretty calm” even as they looked out the windows and watched police cars arrive.
Ed Shanahan is a rewrite reporter and editor covering breaking news and general assignments on the Metro desk.
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