PITTSBURG — Police shot a man twice Thursday in a hotel hallway, ending a multi-hour effort to resolve a standoff that began with an apparent mental health crisis.
According to a police statements Thursday evening, officers responded shortly after 12:30 pm Wednesday to reports of the man breaking out a window and smashing items after locking himself inside a fourth-floor room at the Hampton Inn & Suites, 1201 California Ave.
When officers arrived, they learned the man had barricaded himself inside the room. He refused to exit when officers asked him.
Officers also spoke with several of the man’s family members, who said they were trying to get him help during a mental health crisis and asked for help from the department’s crisis-intervention team and the county’s mental health evaluation and mobile crisis response teams.
Team staff members and officers continued to try to talk to the man alongside his family members and spouse. Police said that during at least one of those conversations, the man said he wished to “end it all.” Realizing the room’s broken window posed a risk, officers called in a boom truck to help cover it with a plywood sheet.
After seeing the man swinging a large butcher knife around inside the room, the police reached out to the department’s tactical team, who came just before 9 pm
By midnight, mental-health staff left the scene without making hoped-for progress with the man. Soon after, officers used a round of chemical agents to try to get the man to come out, followed by several more rounds.
Shortly before 8 am, despite police commands to come out without the knife, the man exited the room with the weapon and confronted officers in the hallway outside. Two officers shot the man with less-lethal foam rounds, but they did not deter him from raising the knife over his shoulder and turning toward another group of officers.
One of those officers fired his service weapon twice, hitting the man in his upper body. Almost immediately, a tactical medic began providing care for the man until paramedics took him to a hospital, where he was listed in stable condition and was expected to survive. No officers were injured, police said.
Following the county’s incident protocol, a police department outside investigator and the county district attorney’s office will conduct separate and parallel investigations into the shooting. The department said it plans to release incident footage captured by officer body-worn cameras and release additional information at a later date.
Contact George Kelly at 408-859-5180.
