On July 28, 2025, Julia Hyman was working late inside 345 Park Avenue in Midtown Manhattan when the ordinary end-of-day rhythm in the tower fractured into panic and gunfire. Hyman, 27, a white woman, was on an upper floor used by Rudin Management, the real estate company that owns and manages the building, when an armed man entered the lobby during the evening commute and began shooting.
Investigators said the gunman came in wearing body armor and carrying a high-powered rifle, opening fire almost immediately in the building’s public space before moving deeper inside. In the lobby, people scattered for cover behind pillars and desks; some ran for exits while others froze, trapped by the sudden realization that the glassy, familiar atrium had become a killing ground. Officials described an eerie moment in the chaos: the shooter let one woman pass him unharmed near the elevators, then continued upward.
Upstairs, workers on the higher floors tried to survive by hiding wherever they could—behind locked doors, inside interior rooms, and in the building’s fortified bathrooms designed to serve as safe spaces. Reports later described Hyman attempting to shelter in one of those secure areas as the sounds of the attack carried through the floor. After a lull that may have suggested the danger had moved on, she stepped out, and the gunman saw her. The encounter was brief and merciless; she was shot and killed on her office floor.
The rampage ended on the same upper level, where the gunman died by suicide. Police identified him as Shane Devon Tamura and said a motive was still being investigated, but authorities pointed to a note found on him in which he claimed he suffered from chronic traumatic encephalopathy and blamed the NFL, whose headquarters were also in the building. The preliminary account from officials was that he appeared to be trying to reach the NFL offices but took the wrong elevator bank, arriving instead at Rudin Management and continuing the attack there. Because the suspect died at the scene, there was no arrest, no arraignment, and no criminal case to carry into court—only an investigation into how the attack was planned and how he obtained and transported his weapons.
In the days that followed, the story of Hyman’s final hours was retold in fragments—by colleagues who knew her as diligent and dependable, by friends who recognized how much she had packed into a young life, and by a stunned city that had watched another workplace become a crime scene. A funeral service drew hundreds to Central Synagogue in Manhattan, where family and friends remembered her for her warmth and ambition, and where grief filled the spaces that words could not.
