Indianapolis police fatally shoot man armed with machete

INDIANAPOLIS (WISH) — An Indianapolis police officer on Wednesday afternoon shot and killed a man with a machete who attacked two people in an east-side business park.

The Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department says two people, a male and a female, who the attacker had injured were stable when taken to a hospital. No officers were injured.

The attacker and the two people injured knew each other, investigators later discovered.

No one involved had been publicly identified as of Wednesday night. The Marion County Coroner’s Office was expected to later release the attacker’s name, and IMPD in past police shootings has waited several days before sharing the name of the officer.

IMPD was called around 3:45 p.m. Wednesday to a report of a vehicle crash in the 1400 block of Brookville Way, east of the I-465 interchange for Brookville Road and Shadeland Avenue. That’s in a business park off Brookville Road.

As officers were on the way to the scene, the report was upgraded to a disturbance with a weapon.

“As an officer arrived, a witness flagged him down and advised there was a male on the other side of the building holding a machete,” said IMPD Deputy Chief Tanya Terry said in an impromptu news conference at the crime scene on Wednesday night. “When the officer turned the corner in his fully marked police vehicle he encountered an adult male in the parking lot who had a machete in his hand.”

The officer several times told the man to drop the machete, IMPD says.

“The officer attempted to create more distance from the suspect, but the suspect moved quickly in the direction of the officer with the machete in his hand,” and then the police shooting happened, Terry said.

Investigators later learned the attacker had earlier “intentionally rammed” a vehicle with the male and female inside. When the female exited the vehicle, the attacker struck her in the head and the body with the machete and injured her.

The male then ran into a nearby business for help. He had been injured in the crash, investigators think.

Detectives believe the attacker had been waiting for the male and female to exit their workplace, Terry said.

The attacker also was a former employee at a business in the business park.

“A witness also told investigators that the suspect told him he was about to witness a suicide by cop,” Terry said. “This was after his attack on victims, but before officers arrived.”

IMPD Chief Chris Bailey says the incident may have stemmed from a domestic situation. He called the crime “a very strange situation, one we wish had not happened tonight.”

The incident left several vehicles in the parking lot with damage, IMPD says.

Officers were wearing bodycams and had cameras in their IMPD vehicles. Bailey noted that the camera footage will be shared eventually, and it’ll show the attacker’s “propensity for violence.”

IMPD says no threat to the community continued to exist after the shooting, and officers were not looking for anyone else.