Manhattan shooter Shane Tamura confirmed to have CTE in autopsy

The former high school football player said in a note that he believed he had CTE and wanted his brain to be tested.

An autopsy confirmed that Shane Tamura, the gunman responsible for the shooting in a New York City office building this summer, had CTE. Tamura entered the building on a July afternoon where the National Football League’s headquarters are located, and killed four people, including an executive at Blackstone and a police officer. He then died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the chest.

Tamura left a message in a note he put in his wallet, blaming the NFL’s denial of the risks for CTE for his mental health problems. He said he believed he had CTE and that he would like his brain to be tested. He was 27 when he took his own life. Police believe that he was headed for the NFL headquarters when he came to the Midtown Manhattan office building, but he took the wrong elevator.

Tamura only played football at the high school level in California; he had never been in the NFL. But according to the police, he had a history of mental health issues.

CTE is a brain disease that is often linked to repeated concussions and causes the nerve cells to die. Experts believe the symptoms, which include behavioral changes and cognitive impairment, occur over years or decades. It can only be confirmed that a person has CTE in an autopsy after they die.

Because of its association with head trauma, researchers have connected CTE to contact sports like football and boxing. A study published in 2023 from the Boston University CTE Center examined 376 former NFL players’ brains posthumously and found that 345 of those players had CTE. Another study from the same research center published the same year found that in a study of 152 brains of athletes who died before age 30, 63 of those athletes had CTE.

The NFL has been the poster child of this controversy, and only admitted in 2016 that there is a link between football-related head trauma and CTE after long denying the connection. In 2013, the organization settled a lawsuit brought by 4,500 retired players for $765 million in payouts. The settlement was not approved by the judge who presided over the case. In 2015, the award was changed to $1.2 billion, which would be paid over 65 years. The Washington Post found in 2024 that the league created loopholes to deny over 100 of those players their settlements.