Yesterday, New York City saw one of those moments that reminds you just how quickly an ordinary evening can flip into nightmare territory.
This is what happened.
Sometime around 6:30 p.m., a man named Shane Devon Tamura, a 27 years old man, walked into the glass-and-steel fortress that is 345 Park Avenue, rifle in hand. If you’ve ever been around that area, you’d never expect a mass shooting to unfold there, but here we are.
He had a target. Apparently, he wanted to take aim at the NFL headquarters. Whether it was a personal vendetta, an imagined enemy, or the brain trauma he wrote about in the note he left behind, we will never know for sure. He got into the wrong elevator and landed on the 33rd floor, where the offices of Rudin Management are located. Not the NFL.
By the time he was over, four innocent people were dead:
- Officer Didarul Islam, a Bronx cop and father of two with another child on the way. He wasn’t on duty, he was just working private security, probably trying to earn a little extra for his growing family.
- Wesley LePatner, a Blackstone executive, Harvard and Yale alum, and mother of two. Colleagues say she championed women in finance and led by example.
- Aland Etienne, a lobby security guard who had been manning the same building for years.
- Julia Hyman. She worked in real estate.
A fifth person, an NFL employee, was critically injured but is, thankfully, still alive.
Tamura killed himself with a bullet to his own head.
There’s something really scary a man crossing the country in silence, with his gun, and an idea that has become a terrible tragedy. The fact that no law offical was alerted at the various checkpoints he would have crossed to get to New York, is baffling. I hope this case pushes the government to implement stricter gun laws, but if wishes were horses…
To the people who died, They deserved more. I hope their families are able to bear the loss.
What do you think?
