By Lananh Nguyen, Doina Chiacu and Brendan O’Brien
NEW YORK (Reuters) -The man who shot four people dead with an assault-style rifle inside a Midtown Manhattan skyscraper was carrying a “suicide note” that blamed the National Football League for a degenerative brain disease he said he had, New York City’s police commissioner said on Tuesday.
Police have identified the gunman as Shane Tamura, 27, a Las Vegas casino security officer and former high school football player with a documented history of mental illness.
Tamura killed two security guards, one of them a city policeman on security detail, as well as a real estate executive and a business management associate, before taking his own life on the 33rd floor of the Park Avenue skyscraper.
An employee of the NFL, which has its headquarters in the building alongside offices of major financial firms, was gravely wounded in the attack, which was the deadliest mass shooting in New York City in a quarter century.
The NFL worker was among several people shot in the lobby before Tamura, targeting the football league, used the wrong elevator bank and ended up in the 33rd-floor office suite of Rudin Management, a real estate company that owns the building, city officials said.
“A suicide note found in his possession at the scene spoke to a possible motive in the shooting and may explain why he targeted NFL headquarters,” Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch said in a video message posted on YouTube on Tuesday.
In the note, Tamura “claimed to be suffering from CTE, possibly from playing high school football, and he also blamed the NFL,” Tisch said. CTE, or chronic traumatic encephalopathy, is a degenerative brain disease.
‘STUDY MY BRAIN’
The note, Tisch said, mentions a 2013 “Frontline” documentary featuring former NFL players who suffered from CTE, which has no known treatment and can be caused by repeated shaking of the brain associated with playing contact sports. Linked to aggression and dementia, the condition can only be diagnosed conclusively after death.
“‘Study my brain. I’m sorry,'” Tisch quoted Tamura as having written in the note.
The NFL has paid more than $1 billion to settle concussion-related lawsuits with thousands of retired players after the deaths of several high-profile players. It has made changes to the sport to mitigate the risk of concussions.
Tamura was never an NFL player, but he did play football during high school in California, according to school sports databases.
A former coach of Tamura, Walter Roby, told Fox News that Tamura was a “quiet, hard worker” and one of his “top offensive players” on the Granada Hills Charter School team.
According to police, the first victim slain on Monday was Didarul Islam, 36, a New York Police Department officer who immigrated to the U.S. from Bangladesh and was the father of two young boys. Islam’s wife is pregnant with their third child. Assigned to the building’s security detail, he was hailed by Mayor Eric Adams as a “true blue” hero.
A private security officer, identified by family as Aland Etienne, was fatally shot in the lobby moments after Islam, along with Wesley LePatner, a senior real estate executive for Blackstone, the private equity firm also headquartered in the tower. Several of her colleagues at Blackstone were injured, according to the company.
FEAR AND SHOCK
The last victim killed was Julia Hyman, a 2020 graduate of the Cornell Nolan School of Hotel Administration, who was working as an associate at Rudin Management, according to her alma mater.
The skyscraper was closed to workers on Tuesday, as were some neighboring buildings, although much of Park Avenue hummed as usual.
The Park Avenue shooting follows last year’s murder of a UnitedHealth executive outside a hotel located just a few blocks away. Prosecutors say the man charged with that murder targeted his victim as a symbol of corporate greed.
NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell wrote in a staff memo that New York-based league employees should plan to work remotely through at least the end of next week. An NFL spokesperson did not respond to queries about the shooter’s reported motives.
HISTORY OF MENTAL ILLNESS
Tamura appeared to have driven to Manhattan from Las Vegas over three days and to have acted alone, Tisch told reporters on Monday night.
In her video message on Tuesday, the commissioner said NYPD detectives would be questioning an unnamed “associate” of Tamura who she said had purchased a component of the “AR-15-style assault rifle” that he assembled for the killing spree.
“This is part of a larger effort to trace Mr. Tamura’s steps from Las Vegas to New York City,” Tisch said.
Security video circulated by police showed a man walking from a double-parked car into the Park Avenue tower carrying what police identified as an M4 Carbine, a large semi-automatic rifle popular with civilian U.S. gun enthusiasts that is 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.
The security camera system flagged the gunman as a potential threat requiring immediate attention as he walked toward the building and seconds before he burst into the building’s lobby, according to two former federal officials familiar with such systems.
A widely circulated photo showed the Nevada permit issued to Tamura allowing him to legally carry a concealed handgun. He had recently worked as an overnight security guard at the Horseshoe Las Vegas hotel-casino, Tisch said.
On two occasions, in 2022 and 2024, records show law enforcement officials detained Tamura for up to 72 hours under a “mental health crisis hold,” which requires the detainee to be evaluated at a hospital, ABC News reported.
(Reporting by Lananh Nguyen in New York, Doina Chiacu in Washington, Ruma Paul in Dhaka, Bangaladesh; Additional reporting by Brendan O’Brien, Sami Marshak, Svea Herbst, Amy Tennery, Daniel Fastenberg, Kanishka Singh, Rich McKay, Helen Coster and Ismail Shakil; Writing by Jonathan Allen; Editing by Frank McGurty, Nick Zieminski and Leslie Adler)
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