NYPD officer shoots, wounds knife-wielding teen

An NYPD officer shot and wounded a knife-wielding teenager in Brooklyn late Friday night after he ignored orders to drop the weapon, police said Saturday.

When three police officers responded to a call about a man with a gun at 221 Linden Blvd. in the Prospect-Lefferts Garden section of Brooklyn at 11:24 p.m., they instead found a man who said he was being chased.

While talking to the man, police said, a 19-year-old man holding a kitchen knife with a 6-inch blade approached them.

Police said the teenager - who they later identified as Stanley Cherenfant - continued to approach with the knife after they told him to drop it.

"The officer used pepper spray on him; it didn't work," police Commissioner Ray Kelly said. "He continued to come toward the officer, and a shot was fired."

A single shot to the body put the man in Kings County Hospital Center, where he was in stable condition.

Cherenfant was arrested and charged with three counts of menacing a police officer, one count of menacing, and one misdemeanor count of criminal possession of weapon.

"He had some issues with his right arm and apparently had use of his right hand," Kelly said. "Whether or not that was a factor I simply don't know."

The shot was fired by a female officer who has been on the force for nearly five years.

Kelly said the investigation into the shooting was ongoing.

Asked about a recent legislative proposal that would require police to "shoot-to-wound" suspects in the leg or arm, Kelly called that notion "absolutely preposterous."

"It cannot work in the law enforcement setting," he said. "We have to teach officers to shoot to stop and, in order to do that, you have to shoot toward body mass. It's only in Western movies that you see people shooting guns out of people's hands, or shooting them in the hand or leg. It just doesn't work like that."