UC Irvine Medical Center was locked down today because a crazy person decided to go there and start waving around a machete. The whole story doesn’t make any sense but let’s start from the beginning anyway. It began with a road rage incident.
The confrontation began late just after 10 a.m. when the Long Beach Fire Department reported a car following an LBFD vehicle and brake checking the LBFD vehicle near the intersection of East Willow and Palo Verde in Los Alamitos, authorities said.
The fire department called Long Beach police reporting a possible DUI and road rage incident. Police arrived and attempted a traffic stop of the suspect.
I think everyone knows this but just in case, brake checking is when you pull in front of another car and then hit your brakes unnecessarily. The story doesn’t say what type of fire department vehicle was being brake checked but most of those vehicles are big and heavy, meaning they can’t stop as quickly as a car or a pickup. So the police decided to pull the guy over.
The driver fled, heading east toward UCI Health — Los Alamitos at Katella Avenue and East Willow.
After a short pursuit, the suspect exited his car near UCI Health medical center. He was armed with a machete. Police called in a SWAT team and a standoff ensued until officers opened fire near the intersection of East Willow and Cherry, just outside hospital grounds.
The suspect was walking around in front of the medical center with no shirt on and a machete in his hand. That’s when the hospital went into lockdown. Police surrounded him and ordered him to drop the weapon. When he refused, they fired less lethal rounds at him. This part was caught on video.
BREAKING 🚨🚨#LosAlamitos / #California
New dramatic video of an Officer involved shooting outside of Los Alamitos Medical Center this morning with a man armed with a Machete. https://t.co/iZX0Rh7v7Y pic.twitter.com/eq5bfZyHNK
— OC Scanner 🇺🇸 🇺🇸 (@OC_Scanner) July 22, 2026
It looks like some of the beanbag rounds or whatever they were firing were hitting him but he’s just running for it. At that point, an officer with Los Alamitos police shot him with actual bullets. He was immediately brought into UCI and there hasn’t been word on his condition so far.
According to the Los Alamitos Police Department, officers attempted to de-escalate the situation using a crisis negotiation team before deploying less-lethal rounds. Police said the suspect then ran toward officers while carrying the machete, prompting officers to open fire…
The suspect, believed to be a man in his 40s, was taken to a hospital in critical condition. Authorities have not identified the outside agency involved in the shooting or publicly identified the suspect.
The circumstances that led to the reported road rage incident remain under investigation.
It has been more than six hours since all of this happened and we still don’t really have any idea what this guy was doing. Here’s what the police spokesman had to say earlier.
#BreakingNews: A man armed with machetes was shot by police Wednesday morning outside a medical center in Los Alamitos and remains in critical condition. The facility was placed on lockdown as officers responded to the scene near Katella Avenue. The area remains an active crime… pic.twitter.com/BZjXF5PiOF
— KTLA (@KTLA) July 22, 2026
Why was brake checking the fire department? Why did he run from police? What was the machete about? None of it makes any sense unless drugs or mental illness were involved but so far no one has said anything that explains it.
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