A man was shot and killed during an altercation with D.C. police in the Petworth neighborhood on Tuesday evening.
Around 6:10 p.m. on Tuesday, a man driving southbound down an already blocked off Georgia Avenue NW crashed into a police cruiser in the opposite lane before getting out, brandishing a knife through the open window and swinging at the officer inside. The suspect demanded the officer’s gun while continuing to swing the knife.
At a press conference Tuesday night, D.C. police Chief Pamela Smith said the man became enraged and the altercation quickly escalated.
The officer fired once, striking the man. The officer exited the cruiser to check on the man, who got up and began approaching the officer again before entering another police cruiser that was also on the street.
While police were demanding that the man drop the knife, he entered another vehicle, where a woman was sitting inside. He attempted to carjack the vehicle, and that’s when another officer fired their weapon and struck the man a second time, Smith said.
The man was pronounced dead at the scene. The woman inside the car was not injured during the incident.
The two officers involved in the shooting have been placed on administrative leave, Smith said.
A couple hours earlier, just blocks away, police responded to another shooting near the intersection of Georgia Avenue and Quebec Place in Northwest.
That shooting occurred when a police officer conducting a traffic stop noticed two people exchanging gunfire nearby. The officer fired in their direction, but no one was struck by gunfire during that incident, police said. No one was arrested as the suspects fled the scene.
Smith confirmed the two shootings were unrelated, calling them “totally separate incidents.”
WTOP’s Scott Gelman contributed to this report.
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