A 62 year old man was shot and killed by the police after he threatened them with an ax. The NY Times says that neighbors called 911 about a "man armed with an ax in the courtyard." When the police got to the Bronx apartment Anatoly Dmitriev, they heard him threaten his 41 year old son's life. So the cops broke down the door, but Dmitriev went out the fire escape. The police shot him when he refused to drop the ax.
Some neighbors describe Dmitriev as mentally ill, and and we did think of Gidone Busch, the mentally ill man holding a hammer killed by police in Borough Park in 1999. While police fired at Busch 12 times, Dmitriev, a Ukrainian immigrant, was shot three times in the chest. He is also the second person fatally shot by the police since Sean Bell's death.
