YONKERS, N.Y. (AP) – An off-duty New York Police Department sergeant shot and killed a man who had stabbed another NYPD officer when a disturbance in a Yonkers bar spilled out onto the sidewalk early Wednesday, police said.

Peter Lee, 20, of Yonkers, staggered 50 feet into McLean Avenue and died after the shooting, said Yonkers police Commissioner Robert Taggart. The sergeant, 41-year-old Michael Ingram, told arriving Yonkers police that he had fired two shots into Lee “to protect the officer who was being stabbed,” the commissioner said.

The injured officer, John Baumeister, 30, had three to five knife wounds to the torso and was in stable condition after surgery at Jacobi Medical Center in the Bronx.

The violence erupted outside Rory Dolan’s, a popular Irish pub just over the Bronx border in Yonkers. Ingram and Baumeister had arrived at the bar after working a shift that ended at 2 a.m. at the 47th Precinct in the Bronx. A third officer was present but was uninvolved, Taggart said.

At about 3 a.m., Lee and another man were asked to leave the bar because “they were creating a disturbance,” Taggart said. He said the nature of the disturbance was under investigation but added the two policemen “may have been trying to intervene.”

Just outside the front door, Lee stabbed Baumeister and Ingram shot Lee, once in the neck and once in the back, Taggart said.

Asked if he thought the shooting were justified, Taggart said it was too soon to say. He said the NYPD was investigating as well, and the two forces would share information. He said the Yonkers police did not test the NYPD officers for alcohol.

Taggart said Lee had been drinking although he was under the legal age of 21.

Baumeister and Ingram are members of a plainclothes street crime unit, the NYPD said. Baumeister joined the force in 1998, Ingram in 1996.

Yonkers police released Lee’s criminal record, which includes convictions and one-year jail sentences for attempted robbery and assault. In the assault case, Lee originally was charged with assault with intent to injure a police officer.

At Lee’s home, his sister, Athenia Lee, would not talk about him, saying, “It’s just too much for our mother, and she doesn’t want anyone to speak to the media.”

Westchester District Attorney Janet DiFiore also was investigating the case, a spokeswoman said.