Police say suspect drove from Las Vegas for days and ended his rampage in a real estate office

New York Police Department officers are seen as they respond to an incident in the Midtown Manhattan neighbourhood. Photo / Timothy A. Clary, AFP

The gunman who killed four people and then himself inside a Manhattan office building yesterday NZT had arrived in New York City just hours beforehand, after driving across the United States for days from his home in Nevada, Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch said.

Tisch identified the man as Shane Tamura, 27, and said it was unclear what had motivated him to drive from Las Vegas to unleash mayhem in the heart of Manhattan at the end of the work day.

Speaking beside Mayor Eric Adams at a news conference, she said that law enforcement in Nevada had told the police department that Tamura had “a documented mental health history” but did not elaborate. She said he appeared to have acted alone.

“We are still unravelling what took place,” the Mayor said.

The rampage took place at 345 Park Avenue, a skyscraper blocks from the Rockefeller Centre and St Patrick’s Cathedral.

The workplace mass shooting was particularly shocking in the centre of New York City, where such attacks are virtually unheard of.

Tisch said that Tamura’s car was recorded passing through Colorado on Saturday local time, then Nebraska and Iowa on Sunday, before he arrived in New York City on Monday afternoon local time.

He drove to Park Avenue, where he double parked his BMW just outside the skyscraper. He then marched inside with an AR-15-style rifle and began to spray the lobby with gunfire, peeking behind a security desk to shoot one of his victims and firing on another who tried to take cover behind a pillar.

He then walked to the lift bank, waited for a lift to take him upstairs, letting a woman exit and walk safely past him before he got on and rode it to the 33rd floor.

Once there, he went to the office of Rudin Management, a real estate firm, where he shot someone and then fatally shot himself in the chest.

The police department said Tamura was from Las Vegas. Police vehicles blocked the entrances to the gated community where he was believed to have lived, and a street elsewhere in the neighbourhood was closed off with police tape and traffic cones.

Public records indicate that Tamura spent at least part of his youth in California.

Mason Thomas said he had played high school football with Tamura in Granada Hills, a neighbourhood of Los Angeles. But he said they had lost contact with each other years ago.

Nevertheless, he said it was “mind-blowing” to see an old high school teammate in the news for a fatal shooting spree.

He said he remembered Tamura as a standout running back who was funny, popular, and agreeable.

“There was nothing from the little I knew about him that would have indicated anything like this,” Thomas said.

“At practice, there were never any issues I can remember. He never had issues with anybody.”

In Santa Clarita, a city north of Los Angeles, Debi Hatfield, said she remembered the Tamura family well.

They had been neighbours for a decade, and Shane and his brother played with her children and went to primary school with her daughter, she said.

“They were typical kids,” Hatfield said, looking across the quiet cul-de-sac at the family’s former home, as crickets chirped in the cool night air.

She said she remembered Shane “as just a little kid following his older brother around. It’s really shocking.”

In recent years, Tamura had received traffic citations in Nevada and was charged with criminal trespass, records show. It was not immediately clear what had led to the trespassing charge.

Records show that a person with the same name as Tamura held a work card issued by the state board that regulates security guards, private investigators, and similar professionals in Nevada from December 2019 to December 2024. The work card did not authorise the person to carry a firearm.

It was not clear why Tamura was in New York City or what had motivated him to open fire inside the building, which is home to the offices of several high-powered companies, including investment giant Blackstone, the NFL, and accounting and financial advisory firm KPMG.

It was the second high profile shooting in midtown Manhattan in less than a year.

Last December, Luigi Mangione travelled to New York City from out of town and staged a targeted attack on a healthcare executive, Brian Thompson, in midtown, prosecutors say.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Written by: Liam Stack, Joseph Goldstein and Amy Julia Harris

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