The Midtown Manhattan shooter speculated that the condition was a cause of his mental illness. But drawing that line is premature—and risky.
Police are still investigating what exactly prompted a gunman to kill four people in a Manhattan office building yesterday evening, but perhaps the clearest aspect of his motive is the condition that he evokes in a note found on his body: chronic traumatic encephalopathy.
The 27-year-old gunman, Shane Tamura, was a former high-school football player. He targeted the Midtown skyscraper that houses the National Football League, though none of the four people he shot and killed before ending his own life was an NFL employee. (According to a statement from NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, one league employee was “seriously injured” and in stable condition at a hospital.) In his note, Tamura reportedly speculated that CTE might have been a cause of his mental illness, but it’s still too early for medical examiners to offer a diagnosis. (And even if an autopsy were to show anomalies in his brain, it could never reveal what precisely drove him to homicide.) Like at least one NFL player who died by suicide, Tamura asked that his brain be studied after he died.
Concerns about CTE and football have been mounting for more than two decades. In 2013, the NFL settled a lawsuit brought by more than 4,500 former players who claimed that the league concealed from them the risks of brain injury, including CTE. CTE is both rare and difficult to diagnose, so scientists haven’t definitively established its symptoms. They’re thought to include memory loss, personality changes, suicidality, and loss of motor control—all of which can be both devastating and caused by any number of disorders. Research overwhelmingly validates the link between the condition and professional football careers.
But the consequences of playing high-school football are not well studied—a major oversight, given that most people who play do not end up in the NFL, Eleanna Varangis, a University of Michigan professor who studies brain injury, told me. “The majority of the experience is at the youth level, and we still don’t know a lot about how those people look later in life,” she said.
