Officer shoots Redwood City man holding butcher knife, police say

After Tasing failed, 20-year veteran ‘was left with no choice but to utilize a firearm’

REDWOOD CITY >> A man whose wife called 911 when he reportedly cut himself with a butcher knife early Monday was shot after charging officers with the cleaver in hand, according to Redwood City police.

An officer initially tried to subdue the 33-year-old man with a Taser, but when that didn’t work, a second officer opened fire, police said.

The wounded man was taken to Stanford Hospital Attendees check out a prototype. Eighty of the homes are planned for two sites in San Jose. with life-threatening injuries, police said. No officers were injured.

Police were called at 8:47 a.m. to a home in the 400 block of Lincoln Avenue after getting a call from a woman who was “frantically requesting help and reporting that her husband was attempting to commit suicide by cutting his throat and wrists,” according a police news release.

Several officers went to the home and were met in the front yard by a woman covered in blood, who directed them to the back yard.

That’s where they encountered the man, who was carrying a butcher knife, police said. Two of the officers, both described as having undergone crisis-intervention training, tried to convince the man to drop the knife.

The man refused to drop the knife and ran toward the officers, police said, adding that after one officer tried to stop him with a Taser, the other officer, a 20-year police veteran, “was left with no choice but to utilize a firearm to stop the male from advancing.”

Additional details about the shooting were not immediately released Monday afternoon.

It was the first officer-involved shooting in Redwood City since last year, when 31-year-old Marco Antonio Carlos, also believed to have been suicidal, was fatally shot after reportedly firing at police in a confrontation outside the Wells Fargo Bank branch near Broadway and Main Street. An official investigative report on the shooting suggested that Carlos was planning to die around that time.

The Monday shooting is being investigated by the San Mateo County District Attorney’s Office. Anyone with information about the shooting is asked to call 650-363-4636.