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On Monday, a 27-year-old man entered a Midtown Manhattan office building with a rifle and killed four people — a police officer, a security guard, a real estate associate, and a real estate executive — before turning the gun on himself. None, it appears, were intended targets, as law enforcement found that the gunman, Shane Devon Tamura, had written notes criticizing the National Football League and theorizing that he suffered from the brain injury chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). The NFL’s headquarters are in the building Tamura entered, but he took an elevator that did not go to that floor.
As investigators considered the likelihood that Tamura — who had never played professional football or had a connection to the NFL — was going after employees of the league, some internet commentators focused on victim Wesley LePatner, a wife, mother, and the CEO of Blackstone Real Estate Income Trust (BREIT). The subsidiary fund of the world’s largest asset manager has an ownership interest in hundreds of thousands of rental housing units around the country. As the largest commercial landlord in the U.S., Blackstone has faced significant criticism for rent hikes, aggressive evictions, and what many perceive as exploitation of the affordable housing crisis to maximize investor profit.
Coming less than a year after the fatal shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in the same neighborhood, which was widely regarded as an assassination motivated by contempt for the American health insurance industry, LePatner’s death prompted a similarly vicious response on social media. On X, the official Blackstone account’s post memorializing her has replies turned off; the quote posts, meanwhile, are rife with memes celebrating her murder, the language of class warfare, and condemnation of Blackstone’s real estate business. “In 2020 y’all bought my apt from a private owner and doubled my rent with less than 30 days notice,” wrote one user. “Had me fucked up. So it’s fuck all yall over there.” Another response reads, “Words cannot express my indifference.”
The more conspiratorially minded went further, suggesting without evidence that LePatner or her colleagues had been Tamura’s actual targets all along — just as Thompson had evidently been singled out by his killer. In doing so, they often compared Tamura to Luigi Mangione, the man charged with Thompson’s murder, who became something of a folk hero to those incensed by the conditions of for-profit health insurance in America. (Mangione has pleaded not guilty and is awaiting trial.) The same people also tried to weave a narrative about a supposed cover-up of Tamura’s motivations and the importance of LePatner’s position at Blackstone. As with Thompson, there was a stark lack of empathy about the life lost and the grieving family. The three other deaths did not even merit a mention.
“I said back when they ‘caught’ Luigi that they could never let us think that someone of the working class could/would ever target someone of the billionaire class,” reads one X post with nearly 3,000 likes. “Don’t let them lie to you, Shane Devin Tamara [sic] had one target and that was the CEO of Blackstone Realty. The ruling class is doing everything they can to make it seem like these were the actions of a man who didn’t know what he was doing because yet again they are faced with the reality that people have had enough.”
A popular activist on TikTok shared this sentiment in a video that has been viewed more than a million times. “Are you wondering why the news won’t tell you that another CEO was shot and killed?” he asked. “It’s probably because of how the world reacted to Luigi and Brian Thompson.” He went on to claim that media coverage had deliberately avoided the term “CEO” in describing LePatner, looking to “minimize her role” and thereby reduce the kind of fiery talk about wealth inequality and late capitalism that came in the wake of Thompson’s death and Mangione’s arrest. The top comment on the clip: “Make Billionaires Afraid Again.”
Other TikTokers jumping on the #Blackstone hashtag have argued that Tamura must have intended to assassinate LePatner, not anyone affiliated with the NFL, because he had not gone to the floor where the league offices are located. (That he could simply have been lost in an unfamiliar building is not a possibility they entertain. Moreover, LePatner was killed in the downstairs lobby of 345 Park Avenue, not in the Blackstone offices, which employees quickly barricaded.) These creators also maintained that the mainstream press was downplaying LePatner’s job and the real estate portfolio she oversaw, despite voluminous coverage that accurately acknowledged she was a top-ranking executive at her company.
All of this content spoke to a desire to revive a vengeful spirit, or extralegal justice, that characterized the online discourse around Mangione. But considering the evidence that points toward Tamura holding a grudge against the NFL, and the present lack of solid proof that he drove from his home in Las Vegas to New York to kill people at Blackstone, it seems unlikely that he will attain the same kind of celebrity. And the apparent randomness of his other victims only weakens the theory that he sought to punish one rich and powerful executive in particular.
That won’t stop the conspiracy theorists from trying, of course, and when the media fails to validate their loose speculation, they’ll just take it as confirmation of a coordinated plot to thwart class consciousness or prevent copycat assassinations of more CEOs. As an X user who claimed that Tamura’s true motivations were going unreported put it in a post, “Can’t have the people getting ideas!” They were one of many to share a cartoon graphic of a smiling star with the caption “CEO DOWN.” It’s a measure of the simmering rage that boiled over when Thompson was gunned down in December — and how eager some are to see it erupt again.
