By Lananh Nguyen and Michelle Nichols
NEW YORK (Reuters) -New York City homicide detectives sought clues on Tuesday to what possessed a Las Vegas man to drive cross-country and storm into a Midtown Manhattan office tower to open fire with a military rifle, killing four people, including a policeman.
Gunman Shane Tamura, 27, brought the carnage to an end not long after it began on Monday evening by fatally shooting himself in the chest on the 33rd floor of the Park Avenue skyscraper, which houses the NFL headquarters and offices of several major financial companies.
New York Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch told reporters Monday night that the gunman appeared to have acted alone, though his motives remained a mystery.
Tisch said Tamura had a documented history of mental illness and appeared to have driven to New York from Las Vegas over a period of three days.
Tamura carried out his rampage, according to Tisch, armed with an M4 carbine, an assault-style rifle used extensively in the U.S. military.
A loaded revolver was later recovered from the black BMW vehicle Tamura had left double-parked outside the office tower, along with a backpack and prescription medications, she said.
Authorities offered no explanation for why Tamura might have singled out the building at 345 Park Avenue, whose tenants include the National Football League, private equity giant Blackstone, the accounting firm KPMG and real estate company Rudin Management.
Among the four victims slain was Didarul Islam, 36, a New York Police Department officer who immigrated to the U.S. from Bangladesh. Mayor Eric Adams described the officer, who had been on the force for about 3 1/2 years, as a “true blue” hero.
Authorities offered few details about the three other victims – two men and a woman. A third man was gravely wounded by the gunfire and was “fighting for his life” in a nearby hospital, the mayor said.
According to recap of the shooting spree outlined by Tisch at a late-night news conference, Tamura entered the skyscraper’s lobby, turned to his right and immediately opened fire on the NYPD officer, who was assigned to the building’s security detail.
The suspect then proceeded to shoot a woman and two men as he sprayed the lobby area with gunfire but inexplicably allowed another woman to pass him unharmed before he took the elevator to the 33rd-floor offices of Rudin Management. There he fatally shot his final victim before taking his own life, Tisch said.
A widely published photo of the shooter, that CNN said was shared by police, showed him walking into the building carrying his rifle. Preliminary checks of the suspect’s background did not show a significant criminal history, CNN reported, citing officials.
Another widely circulated photo showed the permit issued to Tamura by the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department allowing him to legally carry a concealed firearm.
(Reporting by Lananh Nguyen, Michelle Nichols and Daniel Fastenberg in New York and Kanishka Singh in Washington; Additional reporting by Brad Brooks and Ismail Shakil. Writing by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; Editing by Dan Burns, Sandra Maler, Frank McGurty and Michael Perry)
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