39°
"Listen to me, I know you're going through some...," the officer says before his voice rises. "Patrick drop it! Get on the ground! Get on the ground!" he screams. "Drop the knife!"
Then four shots are heard.
The confrontation in Somerset County early last fall lasted barely a minute. About an hour and 20 minutes later, Patrick Chin, 43, was pronounced dead at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in New Brunswick.
The commands and shouts of the five Hillsborough officers who responded to the Sept. 28, 2021 call can be heard clearly on a recording made by a police car dashboard camera.
New Jersey Acting Attorney General Andrew J. Bruck released the recording on Monday as part of a state-required investigation into the fatal police encounter.
The vehicle camera was pointed at the street. The officers didn't have body cameras.
CLICK HERE for the recording: Hillborough MVR (NJ Attorney General)
The officers were dispatched to the Piedmont Path home that Chin shared with his new bride on a welfare check, authorities said. They don't seem alarmed or highly alerted in the dashcam video as they exit their cruisers and head toward the home.
Officers are heard seconds later shouting at Chin to drop the weapon. Then the other officer is heard pleading with him.
The officers apparently tried to pepper-spray Chin first. Then there's more shouting.
Then shooting.
The son of Taiwanese immigrants, the New Mexico-born Chin worked in IT at Merck and Bristol Myers Squibb after being graduated from Rutgers University, according to his obituary.
He proposed to his girlfriend beneath the T-Rex at the Museum of Natural History in Manhattan in 2019, were married last June and honeymooned in Hawaii, his family said.
Chin's loved ones said police mistakenly killed him instead of trying to help the newlywed, who'd been married only three months earlier. The audio released by the attorney general indicates they had no choice.
State law and his own guidelines require Bruck's office to investigate deaths that occur “during an encounter with a law enforcement officer acting in the officer’s official capacity or while the decedent is in custody," no matter what the circumstances are, he said.
The guidelines guarantee that the investigation is done “in a full, impartial and transparent manner," removing politics or personal agendas.
Once the investigation is complete, the results are presented to a grand jury -- ordinarily consisting of 16 to 23 citizens -- that determines whether or not criminal charges are in order.
The release of the dashcam video is part of that investigation, Bruck said, adding that authorities shared it with Chin's family first.
Click here to follow Daily Voice Hackensack and receive free news updates.
