The mass shooting in New York has once again put the spotlight on the National Football League's troubling history with how the league deals with head trauma, and more recently, the links with playing football and chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a degenerative brain disease linked to repeated blows to the head.
New York police say Shane Tamura, a 27-year-old Las Vegas resident who played high school football in the Los Angeles area, killed four people, including a New York City police officer, before turning the gun on himself. Mayor Eric Adams said Tamura targeted the league's headquarters in New York, leaving a note claiming he had CTE.
Tamura also wounded an NFL employee, as police said upon entering the building at 345 Park Avenue in midtown Manhattan, Tamura took the wrong elevator and ended up in a place not originally targeted.
The NFL has been accused of misleading its players about CTE. Thousands of former players have claimed the NFL tried to cover up how football inflicted long-term brain injuries on many players. Here is a look at that history.
While now the league is cognizant of head trauma and has curbed its rules toward the protection of its players, especially the quarterbacks, there was a time when that wasn't the case. The NFL marketed and sold video highlighting the hardest hits.
