Two Philadelphia police officers stepped onto a porch in West Philadelphia after midnight Saturday and walked straight into an ambush. Officer Shane Seiber, 40, a 10-year veteran and father of two, was shot three times and died at the hospital with his wife by his side.
The second officer, 33 and a father of five, was shot 12 times. He is in stable condition at Penn Presbyterian Medical Center, though Police Commissioner Kevin Bethel said he is not out of the woods.
Police were dispatched to the 100 block of North 52nd Street at 12:22 a.m. for a report of a man with a gun on a porch. The officers arrived around 12:50 and took heavy fire the moment they stepped up. Sources told the Philadelphia Inquirer the gunman is Eric Lewis, an employee of the Philadelphia Water Department.
Lewis ran after the shooting, fired on two more officers in a nearby alley, then climbed a tree to hide, investigators said. A SWAT team found him in the tree and took him into custody. Police recovered three guns, two handguns and a shotgun, one of which belonged to one of the wounded officers.
“He fought valiantly, but he lost his life today.”
Police Commissioner Kevin Bethel
Mayor Cherelle Parker spoke to both families at the hospital Saturday morning. “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 said. A procession escorted Seiber’s body from the hospital to the medical examiner’s office.
A city employee waited on a porch with a gun, and two fathers in uniform walked into it. The department lost one of its own before sunrise.
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