A shooter travels to Manhattan planning to target corporate executives he blames for his health issues. He leaves behind a note that law enforcement won’t release and the news media is happy to quote from selectively but won't publish.
Sound familiar?
The parallels between Shane Tamura, the 27-year-old Nevada man who killed four people in a Midtown Manhattan office one week ago today, and alleged assassin Luigi Mangione are uncanny. Unlike Mangione, however, Tamura’s victims had nothing to do with his reported health issues. As a result, his rampage was framed as a random act of “senseless violence,” as President Trump declared.
But former friends of Tamura’s that I talked to say there’s more to the story: that his suicide note’s reported claim that “football gave me CTE” is plausible, given his many years as a high school football star.
The classmates, while clearly horrified by Tamura’s actions, are also able to appreciate the likelihood that there’s a public health dimension to the shooting. Wouldn’t it be nice if our elected leaders were capable of that kind of nuance? That’s certainly how I feel about it, and why I hope that the media publishes the notes he left behind: not to glorify anything but to understand what happened and how it might be prevented from happening again.
What little we know about the writing Tamura left behind reportedly includes three separate references to
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“You can’t go against the NFL, they’ll squash
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“Study my brain please I’m sorry.”
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“Terry Long football gave me CTE and it caused my to drink a gallon of antifreeze.”
Terry Long, who played as an offensive lineman for the Pittsburgh Steelers in the 80s and 90s, committed suicide in 2005 by drinking antifreeze. An autopsy revealed that Long had been suffering from CTE.
