Shane Tamura holding a rifle walks into an office building at 345 Park Avenue shortly before a shooting that killed several people, in the Midtown Manhattan district of New York City, U.S. July 28, 2025, in a still image taken from surveillance video. (Surveillance Camera/Handout via Reuters)
NEW YORK--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 a degenerative brain disease he said he had, New York Mayor Eric Adams said on Tuesday.
Police have identified the shooter as Shane Tamura, a 27-year-old Las Vegas resident and former high school football player and said he had a history of mental illness.
Tamura killed two security officers and two office workers before ending the Monday evening massacre by shooting himself in the chest on the 33rd floor of the Park Avenue skyscraper. 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 used 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," even though he never played at that level of American football.
Chronic traumatic encephalopathy is a serious brain disease with no known treatment that can be caused by repeated shaking of the brain that can occur when playing contact sports. Linked to aggression and dementia, the condition can only be diagnosed conclusively after death.
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 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 a 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.
Wesley LePatner, a senior executive who oversaw some of the Blackstone's real estate operations was also among those Tamura killed, according to the private equity firm, which also has its headquarters in the tower. Several other Blackstone employees were injured.
The skyscraper was closed to workers on Tuesday, as were some neighboring buildings, although much of Park Avenue hummed as usual.
