Police shot and killed a patient armed with the jagged shard of a broken toilet seat inside Methodist Hospital in Brooklyn on Thursday, law enforcement sources told the Daily News.
Officers responding to reports of a knife-armed man threatening to kill hospital staff found the suspect barricaded inside an eighth-floor room within the Park Slope medical center at Sixth St. and Seventh Ave. around 5:30 p.m., Assistant Chief Charles Minch told reporters at a press conference outside the hospital Thursday night.
Inside the room, where blood was splattered on the door, walls and floor, police found another elderly patient and a security guard trapped with the suspect, who had cut himself, Minch said.
The suspect refused repeated commands to surrender, menacing officers with a blood-soaked blade and holding the door shut as police tried to enter, the chief said.
The suspect advanced on police after a roughly seven-minute standoff and officers deployed stun guns, which failed to incapacitate him, according to Minch.
The man advanced a second time and again police fired their stun guns.
It was after the suspect advanced on police for a third time that officers opened fire with their service weapons, striking the man, who died, Minch said.
Police recovered a weapon from the scene, which was later determined to be a shard of a broken toilet seat, sources said.
A healthcare worker in the hospital visiting family on the eighth floor described the chaos as police responded to the knife-armed man.
“The police were running all over,” said 50-year-old Rene Williams. “They said it was a hostage situation. They said they had him contained and were moving him to the emergency room. It was scary. It’s not what you expect in a hospital.”
A Crown Heights caterer was undergoing dialysis on the hospital’s seventh-floor when an alert for an active shooter went out over the PA system.
“I started running downstairs and I heard a bang,” 36-year-old John Brown told The News. “As I was running downstairs, (hospital workers shouted, ‘No, go that way.’ When I got on the first floor, they said, ‘Stay put.’ The hospital was on lockdown.
“I wasn’t focusing on the chaos. I was concerned for my own safety. My objective was to be safe and get home.”
