Shooter in New York tower blamed NFL for brain injury, mayor says

Reuters

3 days ago

NEW YORK, July 29 (Reuters) - The man who killed four people with a semi-automatic rifle while rampaging through a Midtown Manhattan office tower carried a note with him that appeared to blame the National Football League for his degenerative brain disease, New York Mayor Eric Adams said on Tuesday.
Police have identified the shooter as Shane Tamura, a 27-year-old Las Vegas resident with a history of mental illness. Tamura killed two security officers and two office workers from firms in the building before ending the Monday evening massacre by shooting himself in the chest on the 33rd floor of the Park Avenue office tower. It was the deadliest mass shooting in New York City in a quarter of a century.
The NFL has its headquarters in the skyscraper alongside major financial firms, but Tamura apparently entered the wrong elevator bank and ended up in the offices of Rudin Management, a real estate company that owns the building, where he killed one Rudin employee, the mayor said.
"The note alluded to that he felt he had CTE, a known brain injury for those who participate in contact sports," Adams told CBS News. "He appeared to have blamed the NFL for his injury."
Chronic traumatic encephalopathy is a serious brain disease with no known treatment that can be caused by repeated bangs to the head while playing contact sports. It has been linked to aggression and dementia.
The NFL has paid more than $1 billion to settle concussion-related lawsuits, opens new tab with thousands of retired players after the deaths of several high-profile players in the top professional American football league.
Tamura was never an NFL player, but online records show he played football at his California high school and was a varsity player at a Los Angeles charter school until graduating in 2016, according to school sports databases. The note found in his wallet said his football career was cut short by his brain injury and that the NFL had not done enough to address CTE in the sport, Bloomberg News reported.
A former coach, Walter Roby, told Fox News that Tamura was a "quiet, hard worker" and one of his "top offensive players" during the year he spent on the team at Granada Hills Charter School.
The private equity firm Blackstone (BX.N), opens new tab, which also has its headquarters in the tower, said Wesley LePatner, a senior executive who oversaw some of Blackstone's real estate operations, was among those Tamura killed. Several other Blackstone employees were injured and taken to hospital.
The skyscraper was closed to workers on Tuesday, as were some of its neighboring buildings, although much of Park Avenue hummed as usual.
"I've been at Blackstone's offices a number of times before so it's just a really scary event," said Zoe Fields, a 32-year-old associate director for a Boston investment firm who was in New York for meetings on Tuesday at a nearby Park Avenue tower.
The shooting follows last year's murder of a UnitedHealth executive outside a hotel about three blocks away from Monday's rampage. Prosecutors say the man charged with that murder targeted his victim as a symbol of corporate greed.
According to the police account, as soon as Tamura entered the lobby he turned to his right and fatally shot a New York Police Department officer, Didarul Islam, 36, who came from Bangladesh and had been on the force three years. Islam was part of the building's security detail, police said.
Islam has two young sons, according to his cousin Mizanul Haque in his hometown in Bangladesh's Sylhet region. Hours before the killing, Islam had "laughed and chatted like always" with his cousin on the WhatsApp messaging app.
"When I heard the news, it felt like the sky had fallen on me," Haque told Reuters.
Tamura then shot a security guard stationed at a desk in the lobby. The guard was identified by his labor union 32BJ SEIU in a statement as Aland Etienne. He was "a dedicated security officer who took his job duties extremely seriously."
Tamura also killed LePatner before taking the elevator and getting out at the Rudin offices.
U.S. President Donald Trump said his "heart is with the families of the four people who were killed, including the NYPD Officer, who made the ultimate sacrifice."
An NFL employee was also injured and was in stable condition at a hospital, according to a memo sent by NFL commissioner Roger Goodell to league staff.
Goodell wrote that an "increased security presence" was planned for the league's offices "in the days and weeks to come." A spokesperson for the NFL did not respond to queries about the shooter's reported motives.
Tamura appeared to have driven to New York City from Las Vegas over three days and to have acted alone, New York Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch told reporters on Monday night.
Security video circulated by police showed a man walking into the tower, wearing a blazer and carrying what police identified as an M4 Carbine, a large semi-automatic rifle popular with civilian U.S. gun enthusiasts modeled on a fully automatic rifle used by the U.S. military. In Nevada, unlike New York, no permit is needed to buy a rifle or carry it openly in public.
A widely circulated photo showed the permit issued to Tamura by the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department allowing him to legally carry a concealed gun. He had recently worked as a security guard at a Las Vegas casino, Fox 11 news channel in Los Angeles reported.
On two occasions, in 2022 and 2024, records show law enforcement officials detained him for up to 72 hours under a "mental health crisis hold," which requires the detainee to be evaluated at a hospital, ABC News reported.
A loaded revolver was later recovered from the black BMW vehicle Tamura had left double-parked outside the office tower, along with a backpack and prescription medications, Tisch said.