Gunman who shot 3 Philly officers and another person in Northeast Philly ID’d
Police said Michael Hwang, 42, was found wearing a ballistic vest and armed with a 40-caliber Glock pistol and an extended magazine after he was pronounced dead.
In about 20 minutes, what began with an argument-turned-shooting inside a Northeast Philadelphia home on Wednesday night chaotically unraveled into a full-blown shootout in the streets, leaving three police officers and another person wounded, the gunman dead, and a neighborhood shaken.
Just after 7 p.m. Wednesday, police said, Michael Hwang, 42, fired a gun inside a home on the 7500 block of Whitaker Avenue in Rhawnhurst, leading to a verbal dispute with an unidentified man whom Hwang then shot in the face. A 12-year-old boy in the home at the time placed the initial 911 call, saying his uncle had just shot his father.
Officers found Hwang outside the house. He refused orders to drop his gun, police said, and then opened fire, shooting three officers before police returned fire and killed him.
Police said Hwang was found wearing a bulletproof vest and armed with a 40-caliber Glock pistol and an extended magazine after he was pronounced dead at 7:27 p.m. Court records indicate he had been arrested in May on charges of reckless endangerment and possession of an instrument of crime, but was found not guilty at trial last month.
Police did not disclose who lived in the house.
The shooting brought the number of Philadelphia police officers shot on duty this year to six, the highest total since 2019, according to department data. The three officers, who police said had four to 17 years on the force, remained in stable condition on Thursday. The other victim was listed in critical but stable condition, police said.
The child who called police escaped the scene uninjured, along with a woman who was inside the house.
Meanwhile, neighbors struggled to make sense of the violence that upended their quiet block.
Diane Nobles had her front door and windows open on the unseasonably warm night when the police cruisers swarmed in front of her home across the street. She and her husband dropped to the floor when they heard the gunshots seconds later.
“When we finally looked out the window, the number of police who just started flooding the area was pretty crazy,” she said, “but you could see the victim in the street.”
Two of Nobles’ car windows had been shot out in the crossfire, but she and her fellow neighbors counted themselves lucky.
“We all felt sad for that family, and that little boy, but it’s just very shocking,” she said. “You see these things on the news and you don’t expect them to happen in your neighborhood.”
Nobles moved onto the block nearly three years ago, and although she never met Hwang or the family, she said the residents were generally lovely and prided themselves on the safety of the neighborhood — until recently, that is.
Wednesday’s shootout came just five months after an unrelated fatal shooting a few blocks away on Whitaker.