The incident was Sunday, August 16, 2026, about four in the afternoon, at 126 Ludlow Street between Delancey and Rivington on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
The call was a man with a head laceration. Multiple callers reported a slashing.
That distinction matters more than it looks. When you take a 911 call as a cop, everybody has a gun. People elevate calls to get police there faster, because they are competing with every other pending job in an understaffed city. So a lot of calls sound worse than they are — and then there are the ones that are exactly as advertised.
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Officers arrived and found a trail of blood on the staircase. That is the moment the call stops being someone’s noisy neighbor and becomes real. You are checking boxes as you go, and a blood trail checks one.
As they came up the stairs, a man was coming down at them with a large butcher knife. Officers gave him repeated commands to show his hands and drop it. He kept coming.
Instead of holding his position in the middle of the staircase, the officer backed down the stairs and cleared the stairwell. Then officers fired.
Wei Chan, 54, was hit and pronounced dead at Bellevue Hospital. The man who had been cut is his father, 75 years old, a laceration to the head, and he was expected to survive. Officers were evaluated at a hospital. The butcher knife was recovered. At least one officer on that scene was carrying less-lethal.
Early clearance on this one. You cannot slash your own father in the head with a cleaver and then advance on the officers who came for that call, with it still in your hand, after being told to drop it. There is one way that ends.
The part worth studying is the stairwell, and it is the thing this officer did really, really well.
Most of the time as a cop you do not want to give up any ground. Everything in the job tells you to hold. But stairwells are the worst place there is. There is up and there is down and that is all — usually walls the whole way, no angles, nowhere to go. A fatal funnel.
So he had a choice. He could hold his position in the middle of that staircase, with a man above him on the high ground and a blade in his hand, and try to shoot from there. Or he could give the ground up and clear it.
He backed down the stairs and cleared it.
And he was lucky he did. Watch where the man lands when he goes down. That is precisely where anyone still standing on those stairs would have come into contact with the knife. If they had fought on that staircase, or if he had shot from where he first made contact and taken that man down on top of him — bad news. Twenty feet is a problem on flat ground. On stairs, with a man coming downhill at you, it is worse.
One more thing they did right. Listen to them calling out the blood as they move through. That is not just confirming the call. You still have to deal with the man in front of you first — but you also have to start thinking about what is upstairs. If there is something horrific up there, you do not want to be tracking through the evidence and destroying it for the detectives who catch the case later. That happens constantly, and it is enormously frustrating after the fact.
Clean shooting, fully cleared, and a piece of stairwell tactics worth showing people.
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