‘They’ll squash you’: NYC shooter left suicide note saying ‘please study my brain’, blamed NFL

“You can’t go against the NFL, they’ll squash you,” 27-year-old Shane Devon Tamura wrote in the three-page note discovered in his pocket after he fatally shot four people, including an NYPD officer, inside a Midtown Manhattan skyscraper on Monday.

By: Express Web Desk

New Delhi | July 29, 2025 11:27 PM IST

3 min read

A New York police officer stands watch on 52nd Street outside a Manhattan office building where at least two people were shot, including a police officer, in New York. (AP Photo)

In a chilling suicide note found after New York City’s deadliest mass shooting in over two decades, the gunman claimed he suffered from CTE, a degenerative brain disease linked to repeated head trauma, and blamed the National Football League for “squashing” his life, CNN reported.

As per a report by ABC, “You can’t go against the NFL, they’ll squash you,” Shane Devon Tamura, 27, wrote in the three-page note discovered in his pocket after he fatally shot four people, including an NYPD officer, inside a Midtown Manhattan skyscraper on Monday. “Please study my brain,” he wrote.

The former competitive football player from Las Vegas had driven across the country in the days before the attack, arriving in New York City just hours before unleashing a deadly rampage at 345 Park Avenue, a high-profile office tower that houses the NFL’s corporate headquarters on its fifth floor.

According to law enforcement officials, Tamura entered the building around 6:30 pm armed with an M4-style assault rifle and began firing in the lobby, striking a police officer, a security guard, and two other civilians. He then rode the elevator to the 33rd floor — home to the building’s owner, Rudin Management and shot another person before taking his own life with a bullet to the chest.

In total, five people were shot. Only one survived and remains in critical but stable condition.

The note, authorities said, offered a haunting glimpse into Tamura’s fractured mental state. It alleged he had been suffering for years from the cognitive and emotional toll of head trauma, a condition he believed stemmed from his years playing football. While investigators have not yet confirmed whether Tamura was formally diagnosed with CTE — which can only be definitively diagnosed after death — he explicitly requested that his brain be donated for study.

Tamura had no prior criminal record but did have a documented history of mental health issues, police said.

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The Victims

Among the victims was 36-year-old NYPD officer Didarul Islam, an off-duty cop working security in the building. Islam, a Bangladeshi immigrant, was married with two young sons, and his wife is expecting their third child. Police and city officials hailed him as a hero who ran toward danger even off the clock.

Mayor Eric Adams, who met Islam’s family on Monday night, said the officer was “a man of faith” and his father’s only son. Later, just past midnight, fellow officers lined the street in silence for a guard of honour as Islam’s body was transferred from the hospital.

The shooting marked the 254th mass shooting in the US this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive.

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