A woman who was armed with a knife is dead after a Miami Police shooting in Edgewater late Tuesday night, officials said.
The shooting happened around 10:30 p.m. in the area of Northeast 2nd Avenue and 25th Street, the Miami Police Department said.
The woman's landlord identified her as Mariel Rivera Samuels.
"She was very respectful with me," Octavio Pino said. "She always paid her rent."
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Hamid Hamidi told NBC6 the incident unfolded after he came home and found his roommate with a knife.
"She had a knife that I felt threatened with and it wasn’t the first time she had a knife in her hand," Hamidi said.
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He said he called 911 to try to de-escalate the situation, telling them that she was having some sort of mental crisis and was threatening them.
Miami Police Chief Manuel Morales said when officers arrived, the 37-year-old woman didn't have the knife, but grabbed it during a conversation and charged at the officers.
"She charged at them with the knife and that’s when they had to defend themselves," Hamidi said. "They did give her many warnings of, you know, stopping and please come forward and all of that, and she regardless just charged at them and she was shot."
Three officers were involved and two fired their weapons, Morales said.
"The sanctity of life is a central principle to everything we do here at the Miami Police Department, the loss of life at any incident, at any level or by any involvement is a tragic incident," Morales said Wednesday. "I went to the scene last night and I had an opportunity to briefly speak with the officers, they were all visibly shaken as you can imagine."
Hamidi said he had been renting a home with the woman and never thought something like this would happen.
"If I knew it was going to come down to this I probably wouldn’t have called the cops but then I think did I make the right decision, I don’t know," he said.
Police said no officers were injured in the incident.
Officials had asked the public to avoid the area along Biscayne Boulevard to Northeast 2nd Avenue between 25th and 26th streets due to police activity early Wednesday.
The Florida Department of Law Enforcement has taken over the investigation, which is standard practice in police shootings.
