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Shane Tamura is not the first former football player to shoot himself in the chest and request that his brain be examined.
July 29, 2025, 5:42 p.m. ET
The scenario has become grimly familiar to football fans: A former player experiencing cognitive issues kills himself with a gunshot to his chest, rather than his head, to allow for his brain to be examined for the disease linked to repeated blows sustained on the field.
Dave Duerson, the Chicago Bears great, took his life that way in 2011, and Junior Seau, a Hall of Fame linebacker, did the same a year later. Even a teenager in Missouri, Wyatt Bramwell, killed himself that way in 2019, after recording a sober farewell to his family. He requested that his father donate his brain to researchers.
“I would like that to be done,” Mr. Bramwell said into the camera in a video shared with The New York Times by his parents. “I want you all to be happy that I’m free and that I can rest easy, because my life for the past four years has been a living hell inside of my head. I love you. And goodbye.”
The shooter in Midtown Manhattan on Monday was the latest former football player to choose this fate, though only after more carnage. The gunman, Shane Tamura, shot himself in the chest after killing four others. The police said Mr. Tamura, who played high school football in California, carried a note that referred to chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or C.T.E., the degenerative brain disease that has been linked to repeated blows to the head in contact sports.
“Study my brain please,” the note said.
Mr. Duerson, Mr. Seau and Mr. Bramwell were found to have C.T.E., which can be diagnosed only posthumously.
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