Investigators are looking into whether a Las Vegas man who went on a deadly shooting rampage in Manhattan on Monday was targeting the National Football League after it emerged that the gunman was a Los Angeles high school football player with a documented mental health history.

New York Mayor Eric Adams said Tuesday that the shooter, identified by law enforcement officials as 27-year-old Shane Tamura, appeared to have a grievance with the NFL but ended up on the wrong floor of a skyscraper that houses the sporting league’s headquarters.

“He seemed to have blamed the NFL,” the mayor told the WPIX-TV news station. “The NFL headquarters was located in the building, and he mistakenly went up the wrong elevator bank.”

Law enforcement officials have said that Tamura, who appears to be the son of a former Los Angeles Police Department officer, marched into a 44-story office tower on Park Avenue around 6:25 p.m. Monday carrying an M4 assault rifle in his right hand. He immediately opened fire in the lobby, shooting first a New York Police Department officer, then a woman who took cover behind a pillar and a security guard behind the security desk.

After spraying more gunfire across the lobby, the gunman got into an elevator and went to the 33rd floor, which houses the Rudin Management real estate firm. He then walked around the floor, firing more rounds and shooting and killing another person, before walking down a hallway and fatally shooting himself in the chest.

Four people — an off-duty NYPD officer, a senior financial executive, a security guard and a real estate associate — died in the attack along with Tamura.

“Mr. Tamura has a documented mental health history,” New York City Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch said Monday night at a news conference, citing Las Vegas law enforcement. “His motives are still under investigation, and we are working to understand why he targeted this particular location.”

Tamura, who was a varsity high school player at Golden Valley High School in Santa Clarita and Granada Hills Charter School in the San Fernando Valley, had a suicide note in his wallet alleging that he suffered from chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, a brain disease linked to head trauma, according to an NYPD source with knowledge of the investigation.

In the three-page handwritten note, Tamura, who never played in the NFL and has no record of playing football in college, appeared to blame the sport for his problems. He referenced former Pittsburgh Steelers player Terry Long, who died by suicide after drinking antifreeze in 2005, and expressed grievances with the NFL.

“Football gave me CTE and it caused me to drink a gallon of antifreeze,” the gunman allegedly wrote. “You can’t go against the NFL, they’ll squash you.”

“Study my brain please,” the note added. “The league knowingly concealed the dangers to our brains to maximize profits. They failed us.”

The New York City medical examiner’s office said in a statement that it would examine the gunman’s brain as part of its autopsy. “We are investigating and will provide the cause and manner of death determination when available,” the examiner’s office said.

Investigators will also travel to Las Vegas, Adams told CNN Tuesday, to execute a search warrant and look at two firearms that were recovered.

“He never played for the NFL,” Adams noted, “so we’re still unraveling this terrible shooting that took place.”

Walter Roby, who was Tamura’s position coach at Granada Hills Charter School in 2015, said he was “in total shock” when his phone started blowing up as Tamura’s name became public.

“He was just a quiet kid,” Roby told The Times. “He was coachable. If you asked him to do something, he did it with a smile.”

Roby, now an assistant football coach at Crespi Carmelite High School in Encino, said Tamura was a running back with athleticism. But he showed no sign of wanting to play football after high school.

“At the end of the season, I tried to help all the seniors who had aspirations to play in college,” he said. “And he was not one of them.”

In recent years, Tamura moved from California to Nevada where he worked as a security guard at Horseshoe Las Vegas hotel and casino. Public records indicate that he lived with his father, Terence Tamura, a former LAPD officer who spent much of his career working in the San Fernando Valley. According to a department roster, the elder Tamura joined the department in 1967 and later had stints in the Foothill and Devonshire patrol divisions.

There were signs that Shane Tamura’s life was spiraling in Las Vegas. In 2022, Las Vegas Metropolitan police encountered Tamura on the street, exhibiting behavior that made them believe he might be a threat to himself, CNN reported. The police took him to a hospital and put him on a psychiatric hold.

Even if Tamura was targeting employees when he arrived at the NFL headquarters in New York and started firing, no one from the sports league was killed in the attack.

But NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell did reportedly say an NFL employee was seriously injured. A person with knowledge of the situation told The Times that most of the NFL employees had left by the time the shooter entered the skyscraper and that the building was cleared by police from the top down, floor by floor.

NYPD Officer Didarul Islam, who had been on the force for three and a half years and was off duty at the time of the shooting, was working as a security officer when the shooter entered the lobby. A Bangladeshi immigrant, Islam left behind a wife, who is eight months pregnant, and two young sons.

The other victims were Wesley LePatner, a 43-year-old real estate executive at the investment firm Blackstone; Aland Etienne, a security guard who watched the lobby; and Julia Hyman, a recent Cornell graduate and associate at the Rudin Management real estate firm that owned the building.

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul on Tuesday called the shooting a “horrific act of violence” and said her heart is with Islam’s “loved ones, his NYPD family and every victim of this tragedy.”

Hochul also called on Congress to limit the sale of military-grade rifles. The state of New York passed some of the strongest gun laws in the nation, she noted, “but our laws only go so far when an AR-15 can be obtained in a state with weak gun laws and brought into New York to commit mass murder.”

“The time to act is now,” Hochul said. “Congress must summon the courage to stand up to the gun lobby and finally pass a national assault weapons ban before more innocent lives are stolen.”

Tamura played football at Golden Valley High School in the Canyon Country neighborhood of Santa Clarita for three years where Dan Kelley, Golden Valley coach, said that he remembered Tamura as “a good athlete.”

In 2015, Kelley told The Times’ High School Insider that he was “looking for big things” from “Shane Tamura, the returning senior running back.”

But Tamura ended up transferring to Granada Hills Charter School that year as part of Granada Hills’ virtual online program.

In his senior year at Granada Hills, the 5-foot-7, 140-pound player had 126 carries, 600 rushing yards and five touchdowns, according to MaxPreps. He also won several “player of the game” awards.

But even though Tamura gained recognition as he played in nine games in his senior season at Granada Hills, he became academically ineligible and missed the team’s final two games, according to MaxPreps.

The initial investigation indicates that Tamura had traveled from Las Vegas to New York, driving a black BMW across the country over the weekend.

Law enforcement said that officers searched the vehicle the gunman had double-parked on Park Avenue between 51st and 52nd streets and found a rifle case with rounds, a loaded revolver, ammunition and magazines, a backpack and medication prescribed to Tamura. No explosives were inside.

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(Los Angeles Times staff writers Christopher Buchanan, Sam Farmer and Libor Jany contributed to this report.)

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