Features

Police fatally shoot man who stabbed hospital staff

The Associated Press
Monday October 02, 2000

 

VENTURA — A man stabbed three staff members in a hospital waiting room before police shot and killed him, authorities said Sunday. 

The victims’ wounds were not life-threatening and the three were “doing fine” on Sunday, police Lt. Carl Handy said. 

The identities of the attacker and victims were not immediately released, and investigators were still trying to discover the motive for the stabbings, Handy said. 

The man “jumped one of the staff, started hitting him, and took out a knife and started stabbing him” at 10:15 p.m. Saturday at Community Memorial Hospital, Handy said. 

Two staff members who tried to intervene were also stabbed. 

Officers were called and fired a non-lethal beanbag round at the man but were unable to subdue him, Handy said. 

“When he came at the officers with a knife he was shot one time and he died about two hours later,” the lieutenant said. 

Police have had several contacts with him in the past, Handy said, but he declined to provide further information. 

It was the second of two unrelated hospital confrontations in Southern California on Saturday. 

At about 5 p.m., an off-duty police officer from the city of Orange allegedly brandished a handgun and threatened to shoot workers at Kaiser Permanente Panorama City Medical Center in Los Angeles. 

“A nursing supervisor told officers the man exhibited a handgun in a threatening manner,” Los Angeles police spokeswoman Charlotte Broughton said.