Philadelphia Officer Killed Responding to Gun Call: The Confirmed Details

Philadelphia Police Officer Shane Seiber, 40, was fatally shot early Saturday, Oct. 10, 2026, in West Philadelphia. He and another officer were answering a report of a man with a gun when both were shot, according to The Guardian. Seiber had served 10 years with the Philadelphia Police Department.

Both officers were taken to Penn Presbyterian Medical Center. Seiber died from several gunshot wounds, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported. The second officer, 33, with nine years on the force, had surgery and was listed in stable condition.

A suspect was in custody after the shooting. The Philadelphia Inquirer, citing law enforcement sources, identified him as Eric Lewis, 35. Lewis worked for Philadelphia's municipal water department, according to The Guardian.

Kevin Bethel is the Philadelphia police commissioner. Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro ordered flags to fly at half-mast for Seiber. Seiber is survived by his wife and two children, a 7-year-old boy and a 3-year-old girl.

Seiber was at least the 376th Philadelphia police officer to die in the line of duty since 1851, according to the Officer Down Memorial Page. He was the 129th to die from gunfire, the page records. Line of duty in this context means while doing police work.

The broader context here is that the confirmed account is still early and incomplete. The location, the type of initial call, the hospital, and the custody status give the outline. They do not yet explain the sequence inside the encounter, how many shots were fired, or the exact circumstances that left one officer dead and another in the hospital. Those answers will depend on investigators, forensic findings, and formal statements from the department or prosecutors.

Looking at what this means for Philadelphia, the immediate weight is in two places. One is the department, which lost a mid-career officer and has another recovering from surgery. The other is the family described in the official account, a wife and two young children. The half-mast order and the memorial figures place Seiber's death in a long institutional history, but the next questions are narrower: how the surviving officer recovers, how the person in custody is formally processed, and the official account of how a call about a man with a gun led to two officers being shot.