Incident: August 9, 2026, Henrietta, New York. Footage released by the Monroe County Sheriff’s Office: August 20, 2026.
Just before four in the afternoon on August 9, a woman called 911 three times about her husband. He was suicidal. He was in crisis. According to the family, he had already cut his wrists.
Monroe County Sheriff’s deputies were dispatched to the Super 8 on Lehigh Station Road with what dispatch gave them: suicidal male, has a knife, has already cut himself. Dispatch relayed his name, age and description. A hotel employee met deputies in the hallway and told them he was in the bathroom with a knife.
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Deputies were in that hallway at 4:08. A deputy called out “Greg.” Then he kicked the bathroom door.
Gregory Allen Kase, 62, was inside, naked, with a box cutter, already cut. Deputies told him to drop it. On camera he answers “What?” A moment later, “I can’t hear you.” A deputy says “Greg, don’t do this.” He comes out of the bathroom toward them and two deputies fire three rounds. He died there.
About thirteen minutes from the first 911 call to the shots. What was recovered was a box cutter, not the knife the dispatch language described.
Now the footage, and the argument around it.
The family says he was deaf, and that is the whole public fight over this shooting. The claim as filed is narrower than the headline version. The notice of claim describes a man totally deaf in one ear and partially deaf in the other, who wore one hearing aid, needed a raised voice and two or three repetitions, read lips, and could only follow someone he was facing. “Profoundly deaf” is the public framing, not the document.
Watch the video and judge that claim yourself. A deputy calls his name and he answers. He is asked where he is and he says right here. He is told to drop the knife and he says “What?” and then “I can’t hear you” — in plain speech, responding to them each time. Whatever his hearing loss was, the man on that tape was tracking the deputies and answering them.
The other half of the fight is over the 911 calls. The family says the wife told the operator he was deaf and it was never passed along. The City of Rochester said on August 21 that at no point during the three calls does she say it.
Here is the part that decides it. Officers get judged on what they knew at the time, not on what came out afterward. Nobody told these deputies he was deaf. It was not in the call, it was not in the dispatch, and the hotel employee did not say it. If that fact mattered — and it did — it needed to be on the phone with the operator.
And the distance is what makes the rest of it academic. When that door opens he is three to five feet away with a blade in his hand and he moves toward them. There is no room in that bathroom doorway to back up, no room to transition to anything else, and a man that close does not stop just because he has been shot. Deputies hit him and he went down immediately, and that is likely the only reason nobody got cut.
What has not been released: how the three rounds split between the two deputies, the distance, whether any less-lethal option was on scene, and an autopsy. The family’s account says he was struck twice, in the chest and stomach. That is their account, not a finding.
The honest tension is the door itself. He was contained, alone, no hostage, nobody else at risk, and the timing of that entry was a choice deputies made. Against that: a man who had already cut his wrists, alone in a bathroom, where every minute of waiting is a minute he may not survive. Both of those are real and the review will have to weigh them.
No autopsy. No grand jury. No ruling. The New York Attorney General’s Office of Special Investigation has the case, and the state says these reviews sometimes run more than six months.
One point of language you will see in the coverage: what was filed on August 20 is a notice of claim, the pre-suit notice New York requires. It is not a lawsuit yet.
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