Hours and hours of scenario-based police training may never have prepared Portland police Officers Michael Filbert and Brent Maxey for what they encountered early Sunday.

A neighbor called Portland police to an apartment in Southeast Portland to report a naked woman outside, shouting nonsense.

Filbert and Maxey, both of East Precinct, arrived about 1:15 a.m. in the 8100 block of Southeast Mill Street. The neighbor told them a woman had pushed out the window screen of her second-floor apartment and was acting strange.

Maxey picked up the screen. He and his partner then walked up to the woman's apartment and could hear a vacuum running inside. Filbert knocked and told the woman over the whir of the vacuum that the police were outside to make sure she was OK. After a brief conversation, they also told her they had picked up her window screen and leaned it against the door.

One moment, the woman was calmly thanking the officers through the door. The next, the officers heard a loud crashing noise and the door suddenly swung open.

A 61-year-old woman, topless with only a jacket over her shoulders, was holding a large meat cleaver in her hand, yelling "Die!" along with an expletive.

Filbert instinctively moved back, but the cleaver hit him between his radio holster and his left hip, narrowly missing his body and striking his duty belt.

"It was the craziest call I've ever been on," said Filbert, an 11-year veteran

Stunned, Filbert continued to back away as he drew his gun. He said he just reacted.

"There's nothing else you can do," he added. "She's still slashing at us."

Maxey, an eight-year bureau member, pointed his Taser at the woman and yelled at her to drop the weapon. The woman continued to scream that she was going to kill the officers and kept swinging the cleaver wildly, but she got caught in the window screen that had been set against the door.

The woman ultimately complied with officers' commands and lie on the ground.

As they took her into custody, she told them, "Thank God you are here! They've been coming to kill me all day!"

Police did not arrest the woman but sent her by ambulance to an area hospital where she was placed on a mental health hold.

Filbert is glad he wasn't injured and just can't get over what occurred.

"It was the most surprising call I've ever been on," he said.

Officers have had prior contact with the woman, at a different address, said Sgt. Pete Simpson, a Portland police spokesman. Simpson said the case shows how quickly a police encounter can turn from friendly to fearful.

"They're talking to her, and everything's great, everything's fine, and all of a sudden, they hear a crashing and see this woman with a large meat cleaver coming at them," he said.

Jason Renaud, a volunteer with the Mental Health Association of Portland, and Derald Walker, chief executive officer of Cascadia Behavioral Healthcare, praised the officers for their reactions.

"They recognized that here's a person who's not in control of her mind," Renaud said. "That they don't need to shoot first. All they need to do is step back. I think these guys get these a lot. They're intervening in people's mental health crises every day, and they need lots of options."

Walker said it appears the woman was experiencing a psychotic manic episode. "Those kinds of situations can go from routine to serious in a matter of nanoseconds," he said. "It sounds like they backed off, which I think is an important thing to do, but I think it's a hard thing to do. They managed it effectively."

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