On Sunday night Leighton Lee received a strange call from a police officer asking him cryptic questions about his best friend: What was he like? Where would he be going on the subway on a Sunday afternoon?monkaji

Mr. Lee wanted to know why he was being asked so many questions about his friend, Gregory Delpeche. The officer told him Mr. Delpeche was part of “an ongoing investigation,” he said.

Worried, Mr. Lee checked the news and saw there had been a shooting in Brooklyn, on the subway line Mr. Delpeche took to his job at Woodhull Hospital. As videos of the scene poured in on social media, Mr. Lee recognized his friend of decades lying on the ground, wounded.

“I knew that was him, and my heart dropped,” he said in a phone interview on Tuesday. “He was the one that got shot in the head.”

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Mr. Delpeche, 49, was one of two bystanders shot by police officers on Sunday afternoon during a confrontation at the Sutter Avenue subway station between officers and a knife-wielding man who they believed had not paid his fare.

The man who the police said threatened them with a knife, later identified as Derell Mickles, 37, was shot in the stomach. A 26-year-old female bystander was grazed by a bullet and was in stable condition as of Monday. One of the officers was struck by a bullet under his armpit and has been released from the hospital.

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