It is among the most familiar calls New York City police officers answer: a person acting erratically, possibly emotionally disturbed and potentially armed.
But the young officers who confronted a man with a knife in Brooklyn early Tuesday morning, one of them fatally shooting him, had no warning that they were dealing with a “violent emotionally disturbed person.”
The officers were told only that a man had stabbed a young Israeli religious student in the head. He had done so inside Chabad-Lubavitch headquarters in Crown Heights, among the most important international sites for that branch of Judaism. For weeks, the Police Department had been on heightened alert for terror attacks after a bloody rampage left four dead last month in West Jerusalem.
Still, for several minutes, the first officer who responded, Timothy Donohue, 25, pointed his gun at the man, persuading him at one point to put down his weapon. The officer’s behavior was captured in a cellphone video, running almost from the moment he arrived at the scene.
[For more of this story, written by Al Baker and J.David Goodman, go to http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12...tntemail0=y&_r=1]
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