Police shoot and kill driver who crashed into Chinese consulate in San Francisco

Image by Suiren2022 via Wikimedia Commons

By Akemi Tamanaha via AsAmNews

Police shot and killed the driver who crashed into the Consulate General of the People’s Republic of China on Monday afternoon.

According to KRON4, police responded to the scene at Geary Boulevard and Laguna Street around 3:09 p.m.

Sgt. Kathryn Winters, a spokesperson for the San Francisco Police Department, said the driver crashed into the lobby area of the building, CNN reports. Responding officers shot the driver after confronting them in the lobby. They were taken to the hospital, where they were pronounced dead.

Sergii Molchanov, a graduate student at Stanford Medicine, was at the consulate that afternoon to apply for a visa. Mochanov told The New York Times that about 20 people were in the visa waiting area when the car crashed into the lobby.

Molchanov said the driver appeared to be an angry man in his 30s.

“This guy comes out of the car shouting and saying, ‘Where is the C.C.P.,’” Molchanov said. The C.C.P. usually refers to the Chinese Communist Party.

Police are working with the U.S. State Department and officials from the Chinese consulate.

“This is a unique investigation because it did happen inside the lobby of the Chinese consulate so there’s a number of agencies and jurisdictions that are involved, so this is far different than our normal officer-involved shooting,” Winters told CNN.