SAN FRANCISCO (AP) – A man who crashed a car at the Chinese Consulate in the United States earlier this month had a crossbow and arrows and swung a knife at officers before a police sergeant killed him, San Francisco police said on Thursday, offering the first official details of the attack.
San Francisco police showed body camera footage from the officers who responded to the October 9 attack on the consulate, which is in a residential neighbourhood in the city. The footage showed the car inside the consulate’s lobby and people rushing out of a damaged door.
San Francisco Police Acting Commander Mark Im, speaking at a virtual town hall, said Zhanyuan Yang got out of his car, where police found a crossbow and arrows, and stood against a wall. Yang was covering his face with his left arm after a security guard sprayed him with pepper spray and hiding a knife in his right hand, Im said.
Im said Yang then turned toward San Francisco Sergeant Troy Carrasco, who was the first to arrive on the scene, and a consulate security guard and made “multiple, rapid, downward swinging motions with the knife” in their direction.
Carrasco can be seen in body camera footage touching Yang’s back and asking “Does he have a gun?” before Yang, who is rubbing his face with his left arm, turns toward Carrasco and the security guard and starts swinging a knife. The footage shows Carrasco then opens fire and shortly after shouts, “You should have told me he had a knife!”
Yang, 31, was taken to a hospital, where he died.
When asked about why there appeared to be no attempts to de-escalate the situation, San Francisco Police Chief Bill Scott said he was not going to make any judgements nor guess what the officer was thinking, but that officers are trained to prioritise stopping a threat when confronted with an active attacker.
Police investigators have served several warrants at the San Francisco apartment where Yang lived, Scott said, but he did not identify a motive.
“Why he showed up there, what he was doing, that’s still under investigation and there’s nothing that we have at this point that I can release,” Scott said.
