The 32-year-old man was being led out of the apartment by officers when he broke away, grabbed a large butcher knife and began attacking his domestic partner, said Chief Terence A. Monahan in an early morning news conference. That man sustained multiple stab wounds but is expected to survive.
The police officers who fired shots and the two people involved in the dispute were not immediately identified.
The incident highlights one of the more fraught duties of New York City’s police officers: responding to the city’s staggering number of domestic violence calls. In December 2018 alone, the Police Department fielded some 16,400 domestic incident runs. Despite concerted efforts from city agencies to combat it, domestic murders and domestic violence remain stubborn problems across the five boroughs.
Police said the couple had a history of domestic disputes, and the man who was fatally shot had been arrested on assault charges in December.
The man’s partner, who called 911 early Friday morning, had received an order of protection against him Tuesday, police said. It was not immediately clear whether the two had continued to live together or to see each other after that.
Officers received a call for a domestic dispute from 227 Cherry St., a large apartment building, just before 7 a.m. The person who had called 911 met officers at the door and said the man was barricaded in the back of the apartment, Monahan said.
Two officers found the man, who was calm, hiding inside a closet, Monahan said. They persuaded him to come out and were leading him out of the apartment when he broke away from them, the chief said. The man then grabbed a large butcher knife from the apartment’s kitchen and began stabbing his domestic partner, he said.
The two officers, who were wearing body cameras, drew their weapons and fired five shots, hitting the knife-wielding man in the torso, but not before he wounded his partner.
Monahan said body camera footage showed officers immediately performing CPR, but the man was pronounced dead at a nearby hospital not long after.
Paul Savino, who worked at a nearby construction site, saw the man being taken out of the building. “The guy was on the gurney,” he said. “They were giving him CPR. He looked really bad.”
The complex in which the two men lived is part of a subsidized housing unit connected to One Manhattan Square, a luxury apartment building, which is still under construction.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.