SandyMaloneEast Haven, CT – A suicidal man armed with knives begged police to kill him in an apartment building on Messina Drive in East Haven on Tuesday morning (video below).
East Haven Police Officers David Delgado and William Coppola responded to a call for a man with several large knives threatening people at about 4:27 a.m. on March 13, according to the East Haven Patch.
Bodycam footage released by the police showed Officers Delgado and Coppola traveling up multiple flights of stairs with their weapons drawn, as the dispatcher notified them that the call they were responding to was possibly a “suicide-by-cop.”
When they reached the seventh floor, officers turned down the volume on their radios and crept into the hallway to where 911 callers had reported a man with knives sitting outside the elevators.
The man could be heard wailing on the bodycam videos before police could even see him.
“Hey, what’s going on buddy? Talk to me. Drop the knife. Drop the knife buddy,” Officer Delgado said calmly, when he encountered the sobbing, armed man.
“Put the knives on the ground,” Officer Coppola can be heard saying in the video.
“What’s your name? What’s your name, buddy?” Officer Delgado asked.
The man told police his name, and then he began to stand up, holding a large knife in each hand, the video showed.
“Kill me,” the man said as he approached the police officers.
“No, we’re not going to kill you. We’re not going to kill you,” Officer Delgado told him.
The officers advised the man to put the knives on the ground several times as he started moving towards them. An officer was quickly able to transition to a Taser before deadly force was necessary.
“Owwww!” the man cried as the Taser deployed, dropping the man to the floor.
“Officer Delgado made the decision to holster his firearm and deploy his department issued Taser, which immediately incapacitated the individual, giving the officers an opportunity to move in and secure the knives,” the East Haven Police Department said in a statement that accompanied the video they posted to YouTube.
“Once the knives were secure, Officers Delgado and Coppola were able to apprehend the individual without further incident,” the department said.
It took officers a minute to get handcuffs on the man, but they appeared to do so very gently, and almost kindly, as the man moaned and groaned on the floor.
As officers subdued and handcuffed the obviously emotionally-disturbed man, he cried.
“Why didn’t you kill me?” the man asked.
“I didn’t, buddy,” the cop replied, as they rolled him onto his stomach.
You can see the video of the incident below: