One Philadelphia police officer is dead and a second critically wounded after a gunman opened fire the moment cops stepped onto a West Philly porch.
Philadelphia officers answered a call just after midnight early Saturday for a man with a gun on a porch in the 100 block of North 52nd Street in West Philadelphia. The moment they stepped onto that porch, gunfire hit them, the New York Post reported, citing local accounts of the scene.
One officer died. The other was rushed to the hospital in critical condition. Both were taken to Penn Presbyterian Medical Center. Police had not publicly named the victims or confirmed which officer was killed.
The men behind the badges were family men. One was a 33-year-old father of five, shot 12 times. The other was a 40-year-old father of two, shot three times and left fighting for his life.
Sources identified the alleged gunman to the Philadelphia Inquirer as Eric Lewis, a Philadelphia Water Department worker. After the initial burst of fire, he fled into a nearby alley and kept shooting at police.
He then climbed a tree to hide. A SWAT unit arrived. Lewis eventually surrendered, Fox 29 reported.
Officers recovered three firearms at the scene, two handguns and a shotgun. One of those weapons belonged to a cop.
No motive was stated in the early reporting. No charges were detailed in the first accounts. What was clear was the sequence: a gun call, officers on a porch, immediate fire, a chase, a tree, and two fathers bleeding toward the same hospital.
Mayor Cherelle Parker said she spoke with the families. At an early Saturday morning press conference, she described the pain inside those homes and the way the department closed ranks around them.
Mayor Parker told reporters:
"Their families right now are feeling unspeakable pain but watching this department and those families sticking close together as a village has definitely showed me what the indomitable power of the human spirit is and can mean during times like this,"
She also posted a separate statement on social media about the job those officers signed up for.
Parker wrote:
"They put themselves in harm’s way every day, and put their lives on the line, to protect the People of Philadelphia."
Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro posted his own message the same morning, naming the cost of the badge without soft language.
Shapiro said on social media:
"Lori and I are praying for the two Philadelphia police officers shot in the line of duty early this morning,"
He continued that law enforcement officers put their lives on the line every day to protect fellow Pennsylvanians, and that he and his wife were grateful for their courage and service while hoping for a full and speedy recovery.
The early picture was brutal and incomplete. Police had not released the officers’ names. They had not said which father was gone and which remained in critical condition. The public still lacked a stated reason for the shooting and a full charging sheet against Lewis.
What did not wait for those answers was the basic fact of the call. Cops went to a porch because someone reported a man with a gun. They stepped forward. Shots answered them. One officer never came home. Another clung to life at Penn Presbyterian while a city worker who had fled, fired again, and hidden in a tree was taken into custody after SWAT arrived.
Three guns came off that scene. One of them belonged to a police officer. Two households, five kids in one, two in the other, woke up to the price of a midnight response in West Philadelphia.
When officers answer a gun call, they walk toward the danger the rest of the city steps back from, and a city that wants order owes them more than silence when the porch lights go dark.
