Things were tense at the scene of a shooting when police arrived at the scene of a shooting in South Seattle earlier this month.
A man and a woman, both in their mid-to-late 20s, had been shot in a late-night drive-by near Rainier Ave S and S Garden St around 11pm on August 3rd, and the incident had drawn a crowd.
The man and the woman were taken to the hospital—the man with a gunshot wound to the buttocks and arm, and the woman with injuries to her leg, according to police report.
As the gang unit fanned out to talk to potential witnesses, one officer roaming in the crowd—which, according to the report, was “gawking at the shooting scene”—spotted a man yelling.
“I could not tell what he was angry about or make out what he was saying at this point,” one officer wrote in a police report. “I could hear him yelling more clearly and heard him say, ‘I’ll cut your head off.’”
The officer then watched as the man pulled a “blue handled knife” out of his backpack, and charged at another man on the street “while yelling at that he was going to cut him,” the report says.
The officer pulled their gun and ordered the man to drop the knife, according to the report. “He stopped, looked around, spotted me with my duty firearm pointed at him,” the officer wrote in the report, “then started to run back across the street where he came from with the knife still in his hand.
At gunpoint, the man finally threw the knife down and lay on the ground
“I believe that [the suspect] intended to assault or kill [the victim] with the knife,” the report says. “At one point during this incident I was preparing to use deadly force.”
Instead, officers arrested the man at the scene and took him in to custody.
