Police arrested a man with a machete Tuesday after a report the person was involved in an aggravated assault and battery and an extensive, roving search through Harvard Square.
A police scanner report at 8:47 a.m. placed the incident at the Peet’s Coffee at 100 Mount Auburn St., where an officer passed along a report from a person that “somebody brandished a knife at them,” with the man wielding the knife described as being in their 20s wearing a jersey and a bucket hat. Within minutes, police clarified from the witness that the person who fled toward Winthrop Park and the square’s Shake Shack “appeared to have a machete,” a knife with a 4-inch handle and an 8-inch blade.
After the suspect was spotted on University Road, as confirmed by his distinctive jersey, he ran into a parking garage there and went to its upper floors, where State Police suspected he left the garage. That widened the search again, so far west that at 10:22 a.m. came an officer’s suggestion that Mount Auburn Hospital might want to lock its doors because the suspect was then believed to be in the hospital’s parking garage.
The search included Cambridge, state and Harvard University police departments, with a shelter-in-place issued for the area by Harvard in a 9:51 a.m. email.
The person was in custody at 10:23 a.m. at Lowell and Mount Auburn streets, according to scanner reports and the Harvard emergency notification system, and the school’s shelter-in-place order was lifted at around 10:30 a.m. The suspect was arrested at 11:07 a.m. and will be charged with assault by means and disorderly conduct, said Jennie Lopez, director of communications for Cambridge police.
Harvard police also looked for the man near JFK Park early on because of an incident “a year or two ago.”
The previous incident at JFK Park was referred to by Harvard police as an “attempted murder,” though Cambridge police later cast doubt on the description as exaggerated. Harvard police said they encountered the person they believed to be involved at around 7 a.m. Tuesday, again at the park. There was no machete seen early Tuesday, according to a report on the police scanner, but the man was later described as wearing a gray backpack.
Machetes have factored into Cambridge police actions before. A year ago, police engaged in a nightlong standoff at a building in The Port after pursuing a man with a machete from Central Square. A January 2023 fatal police shooting followed Arif Sayed Faisal, 20, running through Cambridgeport in an emotional crisis holding a large machetelike knife called a kukri.
