The suspect is identified as Joseph Anthony Pacini.
He can be heard on one of several video messages police say he posted on YouTube saying, "Clearly these guys want me dead or in prison and there's no way in hell I'm going back to prison."
In the posts, police say Pacini made several threats against law enforcement including a particular officer with the Haverford Police Department.
"The lose-lose scenario, you try to arrest me. Consequently, there will be serious and irreversible catastrophic consequences," Pacini says.
Learning of the posts, Haverford police obtained an arrest warrant for Pacini.
Around 4:35 p.m. Tuesday, multiple agencies went to Pacini's Clifton Heights home, but Pacini got in his vehicle and left.
Officers followed him into Drexel Hill.
That's when things escalated.
"As they attempted to stop him, he threw the car in reverse and he ran into the chief of police car from Clifton and tried to run over several other officers who were around the car," Upper Darby Police Superintendent Michael Chitwood said.
Officers quickly responded.
"Police officers fearing for their lives fired several shots," Chitwood said.
At least five officers fired their weapons at the suspect.
52-year-old Pacini, still in his vehicle, was stuck multiple times and died at the scene.
Evidence of the flying bullets could be found at the intersection of Garret Road and Shadeland Avenue.
There was broken out glass at a bank and a health clinic.
"It sounded like the grand finale a fireworks," resident Lynette Green said.
In his video posts, Pacini talks about not taking the fall for his family and about mafia connections.
Investigators say Pacini has a history of mental illness and say handling these situations is never easy.
"When police have to deal with somebody with mental illness, it could be violent, it could be passive, you just don't know. The unfortunate thing in this case, he's got a vehicle, the vehicle was his weapon," Chitwood said.
Action News has learned Pacini was previously arrested on terroristic threat charges.
The man's death comes a little more than a week after a man who made similar threats shot two New York Police Department officers dead in their patrol car and then killed himself in a subway station. In the New York case, Officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu were ambushed on a Brooklyn street as they sat in their marked car on Dec. 20. Their attacker, Ismaaiyl Brinsley, had referenced in online posts the high-profile killings by white police officers of unarmed black men, specifically Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner on Staten Island. Soon after the officers' shooting Brinsley, who was black, killed himself.
Decisions by grand juries not to indict the officers involved in the killings of Brown and Garner have sparked protests around the nation, with demonstrators lying down in the streets as though they're dead. Many protesters have chanted "Hands up! Don't shoot!" a reference to their contention Brown's hands were raised when he was shot dead by police, and "I can't breathe," which Garner was heard saying on a video recording of his encounter with a policeman who put his arm around his neck.
On Sunday night, two men opened fire on a police car patrolling a tough part of Los Angeles, but the two officers inside were not injured and one was able to shoot back, authorities said. One suspect was later arrested, and the other was on the loose. Police haven't determined a motive for the shooting in South Los Angeles, an area plagued by gang violence, but said there were no indications it was linked to other attacks on police.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.