WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT

A suspect wielding a knife is thought to have killed his girlfriend by "beheading" her and was subsequently shot dead by police officers who stormed the apartment. Officers were called to a suspected domestic violence incident in Seattle and had to force open the door to the apartment on February 7 at about 3:30 am. Authorities found the suspect, 34-year-old Danny Rodriguez, brandishing a knife and looking extremely agitated.

One officer noticed the knife in the man's hand and shouted: "Oh s***, get out", while a second officer can be heard saying: "he's got a knife", as they were looking through the crack of the door and saw the suspect inside the apartment, according to a Daily Mail report.

Both officers can then be heard telling the man to "stay right there, don't move, we will shoot you" and then ordered him to "stop, don't touch the knife", before telling him to "look away" and to "get down on the ground".

The officers then see the woman's body on the floor and one of the two officers says: "s***, she's had her head cut off." The victim was later identified as 48-year-old Irma Rodriguez Vaquedano. In the bodycam footage, officers can be heard telling the suspect, who was wearing a camouflage jacket, to drop the knife he was holding and get on the ground.

The man initially complies and drops face-down onto a mattress but then gets back up and in spite of the officers yelling at him not to pick up the weapon, the man grabs it again. The suspect then appears to wave the knife and both his arms in the air while moving towards the police and speaking to the officers in Spanish.  

One of the officers can be heard admitting that he does not understand what the man was saying and both officers can be heard repeatedly telling the man in the footage that they are "policia". The officers then warn Rodriguez, "don't do it, don't move, don't pick up the knife", before he gets shot four times and falls back onto the bedding. The police said that another man, a woman, and two young children were found unharmed and hiding in another bedroom.

The Seattle Police Officers Guild (SPOG) told the Seattle Times in a statement: "The suspect acted aggressively and gave the officers no choice but to fire their weapons to stop this threat." A spokesperson for the Seattle Police Department, Detective Patrick Michaud, said that he does not know what the relationship was between the man and the woman.

Family members of Vaquedano, who is believed to be from Honduras, told Columbian newspaper El Heraldo that the couple had been together for a few years. The Seattle Times then reported that the King County Medical Examiner's Office identified the woman as Vaquendo and that she had died of "multiple sharp-force injuries".