A police officer shot and killed a man wielding a machete in a Bronx apartment early Tuesday morning, according to the NYPD.
Members of the department’s Emergency Service Division were at the apartment, located at 230 Brook Avenue in the Mott Haven neighborhood of the Bronx, around 4:10 a.m. in order to execute a search warrant.
The division received information about a firearm and narcotics inside the apartment. The search warrant was issued in order to seize those items.
After entering the third-floor apartment, officers went toward the rear bedroom and encountered a man “brandishing a machete-type sword with a two-foot blade,” NYPD Chief of Patrol Terence Monahan said at a Tuesday morning press conference.
At approx. 4:30am today members of the Emergency Service Division were conducting a search warrant at 230 Brook Ave, Bronx. Upon entering the apartment officers went to a rear bedroom where they were confronted by a man brandishing a machete type knife with a 2’ blade. pic.twitter.com/OuMeQn6Dyr
— NYPD NEWS (@NYPDnews) December 5, 2017
The officers ordered the man, who has not yet been identified, to drop the knife, Monahan said, but the man did not comply.
“As the subject continued to approach the lead officer, the officer discharged one shot from his service weapon, striking the subject once in the chest,” Monahan said. “The officers immediately called for an ambulance and rendered aid.”
The man was taken to Lincoln Hospital where he was later pronounced dead. He was not the person officials were looking for in the search warrant, Monahan said on scene, but the person who they did have information on was detained outside and taken into custody for questioning.
An elderly man was also in the third-floor apartment. That man was not injured but was taken to the hospital for observation, police said. No police officers were injured.
The apartment is now being treated as a crime scene and the machete has been recovered at the scene. The search for the firearm and drugs will continue after the crime scene has been secured, Monahan said.
