Cop shoots W. Oak Lane man after 4 cops allegedly are hit by car

A FATHER of eight who was shot by police after his car allegedly struck four cops yesterday in Olney was disoriented because he had experienced a seizure while driving, according to the man's family members and a woman who was in the car with him.

Rudolph "Blue" Keitt Jr., 46, of West Oak Lane, remained in a medically induced coma last night after undergoing surgery for a gunshot wound to his chest at Einstein Medical Center, his family said.

Keitt, who already has two stents in his heart from a previous heart attack, also suffered a heart attack during surgery, his family said. He remained in critical but stable condition late last night.

All four 35th District officers who were injured in the incident - which Mayor Nutter described as "bizarre" - were treated at Einstein and released last night, according to police.

Teresa Clement, 50, a Keitt family friend, said she and Keitt were driving in his red Chrysler sedan to get sandwiches shortly after 2 p.m. when Keitt started to have a seizure.

She said Keitt drifted through a stop sign and "bumped" a wall, although police described the collision as a crash. The wall Keitt hit was a retaining wall near Cherashore Park, on Olney Avenue near Wagner.

With her door blocked by a pole and with Keitt's body "stiff as a board," Clement said, she grabbed his keys and crawled into the back seat and out of the car.

Clement said she then began to yell that her friend needed medical help.

Two men who were on their porch lifting weights and witnessed the crash spoke with the Daily News on the condition of anonymity. One said he saw a woman get out of Keitt's car and scream, "He's having a seizure!"

The two witnesses said they called 9-1-1 while bystanders flagged down a passing police officer, who directed other cops to the scene. The cops pulled Keitt out of the driver's seat and onto the pavement to try to help him.

"Then he woke up and started to struggle with the cops," one of the witnesses said.

At a news conference outside Einstein yesterday, Deputy Police Commissioner Richard Ross said that Keitt appeared "incoherent" and that a "violent struggle ensued" between Keitt and responding officers.

Clement said that Keitt was "totally disoriented."

"He was out of his mind when he snapped back from the seizure," she said.

Clement said the police were between her and Keitt when he was able to reach over the officers and grab his car keys from her hand.

One of the witnesses said he watched Keitt get back inside the car and tell officers, "I'm cool."

The car, which was resting on the sidewalk, lurched backward into the street, striking one cop, as seen in a cellphone video obtained by the Daily News. It then sped away, knocking down a second officer in the process, and turned left onto nearby 7th Street.

That's when one of the witnesses jumped into his own car and followed Keitt.

By the time the man caught up to the scene of a second crash on Chew Street near 7th, he said, Keitt was already gone.

The witness said an officer, apparently hit by Keitt, was sitting on a crate, being tended to by nearby residents.

One woman poured water over the officer, who "looked like he was disoriented," the witness said. At one point, the officer lay on the ground and the woman helped him remove his shoes.

Last night, a police spokeswoman confirmed those details, adding that the officer struck on Chew Street was the most severely injured of the four, and required a CAT scan later at Einstein.

Minutes after that second crash, the witnesses' friend, who had followed him on his bike, was sitting at 7th and Olney when he saw the Chrysler come barreling back toward the scene of the initial crash.

He jumped out of the way and watched Keitt speed toward a fire engine parked at the end of the block. Keitt somehow pulled between the engine and a passing SEPTA bus through a gap of about 8 feet.

"I couldn't believe it," the witness said. "You should've seen the faces of the people on the bus. They were terrified."

Police said that Keitt then drove to Stenton Avenue near Ogontz, where his vehicle struck a fourth officer. Two other officers then opened fire on Keitt's vehicle, striking him once in the chest.

Broken glass and police vehicles sat on the street just outside a Crown Chicken & Grill.

After he was shot, Keitt drove about a block away, to the home he shares with his girlfriend, Angela Campbell, on Colonial Drive near Ogontz Avenue. There, he parallel-parked perfectly by the curb and collapsed outside.

Campbell, 46, said she was not home at the time.

"My house was taped off because there is so much blood," she said. "It was a lot of blood. A lot of blood, like he was trying to come in the house."

At that location, Lt. John Stanford, a police spokesman, said he wasn't surprised that the suspect had parallel-parked the car so well while bleeding profusely.

"That's the adrenaline," Stanford said.

Speaking outside the emergency room at Einstein, Keitt's family - including his brother, Kevin; mother, Louise; and father, Rudolph Sr. - said that Nutter and Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey had spoken with them. So they were surprised when, at an afternoon news conference outside the hospital, Nutter said that Keitt "used a car as a weapon against our officers."

"They turned a medical situation into a criminal one," Kevin Keitt said. "We don't understand why they used deadly force."

Rudolph Keitt Sr. said authorities were not letting the family in to see his son.

"We still are concerned about my son's condition," he said. "We can't see him until tomorrow."

The family said Keitt was not armed. They said he takes medications for seizures and had a seizure as recently as March.

Brian Mildenberg, a lawyer retained by Keitt's family, echoed the family's statements, saying that Keitt is prone to seizures and was having one when his Chrysler crashed into the park's wall.

"He was delusional the whole time and didn't understand what he was doing," said Mildenberg, who gained prominence earlier this year as legal counsel for Tanya Brown-Dickerson, the mother of police-shooting victim Brandon Tate-Brown.