A 46-year-old man died Friday night after police officers in Queens shot at him four times and used a Taser because they said he was wielding a knife after a dispute at a social gathering, the authorities said.
At around 6:50 p.m., the police responded to reports of an assault on the second floor of an apartment building in the Forest Hills section of Queens. As officers left a staircase into the second-floor hallway, the police said, they found a man, who was believed to have stabbed a woman, holding a knife. Officers yelled at the man to drop the knife, but he charged at them instead, Jeffrey Maddrey, the chief of department, said at a news conference Friday night.
A sergeant discharged his Taser as two other officers fired their guns, the police said. The man later died at a nearby hospital, the police said.
Body camera footage has not been released, but Chief Maddrey said that the officers had been wearing cameras that recorded the incident and that he had seen it. He added that security cameras in the building had recorded the man as he left an apartment with a knife and a woman as she left the same apartment holding her stomach, which was bleeding. She was later taken to the hospital with at least two stab wounds, the police said.
It was not clear when officers had watched the security footage, and the police did not say how the man and woman might be connected. The woman’s age and condition were not immediately available.
The initial assault stemmed from an argument at a party where several children were present, the police said.
