By the CNN Wire Staff
(CNN) — New York police on Sunday identified the man fatally wounded the day earlier by officers a short walk from Manhattan’s Times Square as a 51-year-old from nearby Long Island.
Darrius Kennedy, who the New York Police Department named in a press release and said was from Hempstead, New York, died after being shot Saturday afternoon. Police said he threatened officers with a knife and repeatedly resisted their attempts to arrest him.
The incident began shortly after 3 p.m. around 7th Avenue and 44th Street, an area popular with shoppers and tourists. Officers there approached a man because he was smoking what appeared to be a “marijuana cigarette,” Deputy Police Commissioner Paul Browne said Saturday.
After becoming agitated, the man “placed the marijuana cigarette in his pocket and pulled out an 11-inch knife, raised it above his head and began to put a blue bandana on his head,” police said on Sunday.
Kennedy moved south down 7th Avenue, refusing officers’ attempts to arrest him and their pleas that he drop the knife, according to police.
Video shot by CNN iReporter David Fowler shows several officers — at least three of them with their guns drawn — following the man through the middle of Times Square. Some people can be overheard yelling “they can’t shoot him” as the man backs down the street.
Officers deployed pepper spray six separate times during the drawn-out ordeal, “to no avail,” police said.
Around the intersection of Seventh Avenue and 37th Street, the man “advanced on uniformed officers, refusing officers’ repeated commands to drop his weapon,” Browne said.
Kennedy was then shot in the torso by two officers, according to police.
The wounded man was transported to Manhattan’s Bellevue Hospital and pronounced dead at 3:42 p.m. Saturday.
The two officers who shot him were taken to the same hospital for tinnitus, or ringing in the ears, presumably from the sound of the gunshots. A third officer who’d been exposed to pepper spray was treated for eye irritation, police said Sunday.
Browne said Saturday that the officers involved in the shooting will be on required administrative duty while the incident is reviewed.
CNN’s Jareen Imam and Dominique Debucquoy-Dodley contributed to this report.
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