Three Philadelphia police officers were shot late Saturday night in Wynnefield after an encounter near 54th and Arlington streets turned into a gunfight that left a 57-year-old man dead. By early Sunday morning, police said the officers were in stable condition and expected to recover.

Philadelphia Police Department Commissioner Kevin Bethel said the officers had been responding to a shooting report around 10:33 p.m. Saturday when they found a car that had been shot up. He said the man they confronted kept engaging officers after they told him to stand down, then drew a weapon when they tried to arrest him. Four officers returned fire, and one officer was shot in the face, another in the hip and a third in the leg.

Bethel described the officers as “husbands, fathers, sons, brothers who came to work today and almost didn’t make it home,” a line that landed hard because three officers were injured in one exchange and no civilians or bystanders were hurt. The suspect was identified only as a 57-year-old man early Sunday, and police had not released the names of the officers or the man who died.

What still hangs over the case is the first shooting that brought officers to the block in the first place. Police were still investigating both that report and the gunfight that followed, which means the reason the man confronted officers, and the sequence that led from a shot-up car to a fatal exchange, remains unanswered. For now, the clearest fact is also the starkest one: three officers survived, the suspect did not, and the city is left waiting for the next account of what happened before the shots were fired.