A 27-year-old man was shot and tased by Baltimore police after charging at officers with a chair and a knife at a behavioral health clinic at the University of Maryland Medical Center, police said Thursday.
The man, whose name was not released, was taken to the nearby Shock Trauma Center with critical injuries, police spokesman T.J. Smith said.
The shooting happened about 1:25 p.m. in a fifth-floor waiting room at a behavioral health clinic on the UMMC campus at 701 W. Pratt St.
Officers arrived to find the man holding a knife, “acting in an erratic way; [he] had thrown several chairs in a waiting area around,” Smith said.
Hospital staff and police repeatedly asked the man to drop the weapon, he said.
“It didn’t appear to be an extended negotiation,” Smith said. “But there were … a number of moments where officers are repeatedly asking him to put down the knife.”
When the man charged, officers shot him in the upper body and the leg, Smith said. At least one fired a taser at him, he said.
It’s unclear how many officers fired their guns, but some of them were wearing body cameras, the footage of which will be reviewed during the investigation.
Baltimore Police Commissioner Gary Tuggle, the police Special Incident Response Team and the U.S. Department of Justice’s consent decree monitoring team all responded to the incident.
The UMMC building where the shooting occurred primarily houses a behavioral health facility, according to a hospital spokeswoman, Karen Lancaster.
Witnesses on the scene said they saw the man being taken out on a stretcher.
