The 911 calls came in just after 1 a.m. A man requested an ambulance for his sisterlol646, who had bipolar disorder and was experiencing a mental health emergency at her apartment in Fort Lee, N.J. It was not the first time.

In the past, emergency responders had carefully de-escalated the situation before taking the woman, Victoria G. Lee, to a hospital for treatment. But on the morning of July 28, less than an hour after her brother called 911 twice and told the operator that his sister was in crisis and holding a “foldable” knife, Ms. Lee was killed.

When police officers arrived, Ms. Lee, 25, refused to let them into her apartment and threatened to stab one of them. An officer then rammed through the locked front door, according to body camera footage released by the New Jersey attorney general’s office. As officers yelled “drop the knife,” Ms. Lee moved forward and the officer fired his gun.

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“I can’t breathe,” gasped Ms. Lee, who lay bleeding on the ground as officers shouted.

The shooting seemed, in some ways, to resemble other police killings of people having mental health crises that have drawn scrutiny in New Jersey and across the country.

ImageAsian American leaders in Fort Lee worried that the killing of Ms. Lee, who had bipolar disorder, would worsen existing stigmas around seeking help for mental health issues.

But in other ways, it was unusual: Asian American women like Ms. Lee, who was Korean American, are rarely killed by officers. And police officers in Fort Lee seldom use lethal force. While the office of the borough clerk and the Fort Lee Police Department both declined to provide information on police killings, data collected by Mapping Police Violence, a nonprofit group, shows that Ms. Lee was only the second person fatally shot by officers in Fort Lee since 2013.

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