Police fatally shoot Elwood man who confronted them with swords, Suffolk Police Commissioner Rodney Harrison says

A Suffolk police officer responding to a 911 call in Elwood Tuesday night shot and killed a resident who charged at him and his partner with two fencing swords, officials said at a news conference in Yaphank. 

Suffolk Police Commissioner Rodney K. Harrison on Wednesday said the shooting of Alan Weber, 54, was justified because Weber refused to cooperate with officers even after they used a Taser on him. 

“Him charging at the officers, I feel the officers had no other choice but to use what they had to use to stop the threat,” Harrison said. 

Officers responded to several calls Tuesday afternoon and evening to Weber’s Mander Lane home about a man acting strangely and sometimes violently, Harrison said. The commissioner said police are still trying to determine if Weber was suffering from a mental health crisis.

Nick DeLuca, Weber’s next-door neighbor, said he became concerned two weeks ago when Weber banged on his front door and kicked his car, denting it. On Tuesday, DeLuca said he saw Weber running barefoot on nearby lawns and rifling through residents’ mailboxes. He later tried to enter a neighbor’s home through a backyard door, DeLuca said. 

Another neighbor, Natalie Kaufman, said Weber had left rosary beads at her front door and had taken some of her family’s mail. 

“We have a Jewish last name, so when I saw rosary beads on my door and heard that he was taking our mail and saw our last name, that was unsettling,” Kaufman said. 

Police responded to several 911 calls about Weber’s behavior but did not detain him because, Kaufman said officers told her, he had not broken into neighbors’ homes.

“We basically ended the conversation with ‘What happens next?’ ” Kaufman said of her discussions with police. “Because we did think this was going to get worse.”

Harrison said police received another 911 call about a disturbance inside Weber’s home at 8:44 p.m. Officers who arrived at the scene about four minutes later looked into the window and saw the inside of the home in “total disarray,” the commissioner said. 

“They were concerned, was there anybody else in the house in harm’s way,” Harrison added. 

The officers found Weber in the basement of the home. Weber was wearing a fencing mask and holding two fencing swords, Harrison said. The officers demanded that he put the swords down. When Weber refused, one officer, a four-year veteran with the Suffolk County Police Department, fired a Taser at him. 

“The Taser did not have an effect on our subject, at which time he charged at our officers. Our other officer, that was there at the scene, pulled out his firearm and shot several times at our subject, and our subject went down,” Harrison said. 

The officer who fired the fatal shot is a six-year department veteran, Harrison said. 

The officers performed CPR on Weber, who was taken to Huntington Hospital. He died of his injuries at the hospital, Harrison said. 

Both officers had received crisis intervention training to de-escalate interactions with mentally ill people. 

Weber had been arrested and charged with criminal mischief earlier this year and in 2010, according to online court records. He was also arrested and charged with reckless endangerment in 2017.

The 1,000-page police reform plan approved by the county legislature called for several changes to how police respond to calls about mental health crises. 

These changes included having Suffolk County police dispatchers diverting some 911 calls to crisis hotline workers, having officers use videoconferencing to work with social workers at the Diagnostic, Assessment and Stabilization Hub (DASH), a 24-hour crisis intervention center.

The plan also called on officers to refer residents with mental health issues who are the subject of three or more 911 calls in six months to the Family Service League, the social services organization that operates DASH and provides counseling, addiction treatment and other assistance.

“I think they acted out of self-defense,” Kaufman said of the police. “I just wish there were better protocols in place to have taken better care of him earlier in the day when we said to them that things are going to escalate.”

Alexis Richards, a spokeswoman for the state attorney general’s office, which investigates police shootings where civilians are killed, said she would have an update on the case later Wednesday.

With Matthew Chayes