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The Las Vegas police released documents and records describing the mental health breakdowns that the man who killed four people in a New York building had faced earlier.
Aug. 5, 2025Updated 9:18 p.m. ET
The mother of Shane Devon Tamura was desperate. Her son was inside a motel in Las Vegas, threatening to kill himself, according to a 911 call released on Tuesday by the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department.
She told the 911 operator she wasn’t sure he was carrying a gun but she knew he owned one and had a backpack with a holster that could hold such a weapon.
“I was just in the apartment with him and he started crying and slamming things,” the mother said in the recording, which the Las Vegas police released Tuesday evening. He had told her “he couldn’t take it anymore.” She left and hid in her car, worried he could see her but too worried to drive off.
“I’m afraid to leave,” she told the caller.
It was September 2022, and police were so concerned about Mr. Tamura, then 24, that they filed an emergency petition to have him committed to a mental health facility following the episode. His mother said he had depression, insomnia, struggled with migraines and was still recovering from a concussion he got from a sports injury.
Less than three years later, Mr. Tamura stormed inside a building in midtown Manhattan, headed for the offices of the National Football League, holding an AR-15-style rifle. He fatally shot four people — a police officer, a security guard, and two office workers — before turning the weapon on himself and shooting himself in the chest.
Police in New York have been trying to get a deeper understanding of Mr. Tamura’s mental health history as they investigate his background and what led him to drive cross country from his studio apartment in Las Vegas to a skyscraper in Manhattan, where he committed the worst shooting in the city in 25 years.
On Tuesday, the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department released documents and recordings of 911 calls that provided a clearer picture of the mental health struggles of Mr. Tamura, a former high school football player who appeared to blame the National Football League for traumatic brain injuries.
The New York building where the attacks occurred, 345 Park Avenue, housed the headquarters of the National Football League. Mr. Tamura had a three-page note in his wallet that referred to chronic traumatic encephalopathy and blamed the league for downplaying the condition. The degenerative brain disease has been associated with repeated hits to the head, and can be definitively diagnosed only after death.
Mr. Tamura left behind two suicide notes, one found in his wallet at the crime scene, begging doctors to study his brain.
The details that emerged Tuesday gave a clearer picture of Mr. Tamura’s state of mind in the years leading up to a shooting that was the deadliest in New York City since 2000.
Mr. Tamura, 27, who lived in a studio apartment in Las Vegas, was supposed to report to work on July 27 at the Horseshoe Casino, where he was a security guard.
But by then, he was driving cross-country to New York in a black BMW that his supervisor had sold him, along with an AR-15-style rifle, loaded magazines and hundreds of bullets.
Mr. Tamura arrived in New York City on Monday afternoon. He parked his black BMW in front of the building on Park Avenue, walked inside with a rifle and began firing.
He killed a Police Department officer, killed another victim behind a security desk and another who took cover behind a pillar. He shot an employee from the N.F.L., wounding him but not killing him. Mr. Tamura then rode an elevator to the 33rd floor.
The police said they believed he had been looking for the N.F.L. office, but he had gone to the wrong elevator bank. Instead, he entered the office of Rudin Management, a real estate firm, where he shot and killed another woman.
Then he fatally shot himself in the chest.
Mr. Tamura had a history of minor troubles and run-ins with the authorities in Las Vegas.
He was charged with criminal trespass in 2023 after an incident at the Red Rocks Resort and Casino in Las Vegas, where he was gambling and became agitated after he was asked to leave the premises for refusing to show security guards his I.D. The police removed him from the casino in handcuffs after he tried to grab a security guard and said he had been “obstructive” with officers, according to a police report.
Mr. Tamura was pulled over for driving an unregistered black 2011 BMW convertible without a valid driver’s license in May 2024, records show. The officers noted that his attitude was “courteous” during the stop.
Records show that a person with the same name as Mr. 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 authorize the person to carry a firearm.
He had worked as an unarmed security guard for Securitas USA in Henderson, Nev., from February 2020 until December 2021, according to Nevada licensing records. A spokesman for Securitas USA said Mr. Tamura had completed all required background screening and said that his “work history was unremarkable.”
Maria Cramer is a Times reporter covering the New York Police Department and crime in the city and surrounding areas.
Amy Julia Harris has been an investigative reporter for more than a decade and joined The Times in 2019. Her coverage focuses on New York.
