A Pasco deputy fatally shot a man who was armed with a knife in a Hudson shopping center Friday afternoon, the agency said.
Deputies were called to 12101 Little Road — at the Tower Oaks Terrace shopping center — around noon for reports of an “agitated subject outside of a business,” the sheriff’s office said in a news release.
When three deputies arrived shortly before 12:30 p.m., they found a man at the north end of the plaza.
The man “immediately armed himself with a 7½-inch butcher knife,” Col. Jeffrey Harrington, the sheriff’s office chief of staff, said in a news conference Friday afternoon.
“There are a number of folks walking in the area,” Harrington said. “The deputy sheriff was ultimately forced to fire, and as he fired at this subject, the subject eventually went down as a result of his wounds.”
The man was pronounced dead at the scene.
Harrington said the man did not attack the deputies. “The concerning things to us were that there were people walking around … and this person had a 7½-inch butcher knife,” he said. “So the concern was not necessarily singularly on what he did or did not do to the deputy sheriff, but because of the safety of the people walking around.”
The agency released a 26-second video from the deputy’s body-worn camera that captured the shooting. In the video, the deputy can be heard telling the man five times to drop the knife. The man can be heard saying, “Listen, bro,” and “F— you got going on?”
After the fifth command to drop the knife, the deputy opened fire. A total of eight shots could be heard in the video before the man fell to the ground.
The sheriff’s office did not release the man’s name because his next of kin had not yet been notified, Harrington said. The sheriff’s office also did not release the name of the deputy who opened fire.
The deputy has been placed on paid administrative leave, per the sheriff’s office’s policy. The Florida Department of Law Enforcement and the Pinellas-Pasco State Attorney’s Office will investigate the shooting.
