On Monday evening, as a deadly shooting unfolded inside a New York City building headquartering multiple offices, including the NFL’s home base of operations, an executive for one NFC team got a text from his daughter that jolted him in his chair.
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“Hey dad, there’s an active shooter in the building.”
“I’m in a meeting, and I’m like, ‘holy ****’,” the executive told Yahoo Sports on Tuesday. “Then she followed up, saying ‘I went home an hour ago.’ But you know, all of her co-workers and friends … ”
His voice trailed off.
“Terrible,” he said. “Terrible.”
With a wide swath of NFL team personnel and coaches counting friends or family among those working in the league’s Manhattan offices at 345 Park Ave. — or some members of teams having worked in those offices themselves at some point — Monday’s shooting attack sent reverberations across the league. Police said a 27-year-old man had entered the 44-story Midtown high-rise with an assault rifle and opened fire, eventually killing four and wounding one as he made his way to the 33rd floor of the building.
NYPD officers line up during the dignified transfer of Didarul Islam, who was shot and killed by a gunman Monday evening, out of New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Hospital to the medical examiner’s office on Tuesday. (AP Photo/Angelina Katsanis)
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
On Tuesday morning, New York City Mayor Eric Adams said police had recovered a note from the man, stating that he had chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) and blamed the NFL for the neurodegenerative disease. Adams said it appeared the man intended to target the NFL’s league offices during the attack, but entered the wrong elevator bank before ending up on the 33rd floor, where he shot one of his victims before killing himself. NFL commissioner Roger Goodell notified the league’s teams on Monday night that one of its employees had been “seriously injured” in the attack and hospitalized in stable condition.
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Later on Tuesday Goodell announced that the league’s Manhattan office will stay closed until at least Aug. 8.
While news of the shooting sent shockwaves across the league, the development that the NFL offices were specifically targeted left some deeply stunned. Multiple sources across the league told Yahoo Sports on Tuesday that coaches and executives inside their teams spent parts of their day talking about the incident. So much so, one NFC general manager asked his head of security to go over the team’s protocols when it came to protecting training camp activities and the grounds that house the offices, locker room and other facilities.
“It felt like something we needed to at least talk about,” the general manager told Yahoo Sports.
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Across the league, multiple individuals expressed shock and sadness over the shooting, which comes in the midst of training camp environments where players, coaches and executives are able to be seen and interacted with by fan bases more closely than at any other time of year.
“It really just hit me in the last couple of hours exactly what did happen, and it’s the scariest thing imaginable,” San Francisco 49ers head coach Kyle Shanahan told Yahoo Sports. “Not just for [the NFL], but for everyone out there. It’s really scary watching something like that happen.”
Shanahan wasn’t alone in his thoughts. At least 10 teams addressed the shooting in some way on Tuesday, cutting across the organizations and including players, coaches, executives and team owners.
“Our hearts go out to the victims of the horrific attack and people of New York, many of whom were simply working hard to support their families,” Baltimore Ravens head coach John Harbaugh told reporters Tuesday. “We stand with everyone affected and send out deepest condolences to the victims of this senseless act.”
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As of Tuesday night, there had not yet been any kind of league mandate to teams when it came to security measures for training camps or the headquarters of franchises. But it’s a point that resonates on the heels of the past few years, which has seen a handful of concerning security breaches, including some high-profile burglaries of players’ homes, as well as private information being shared online from both players and coaches.
“The organization spends a lot of time putting ourselves in the safest, best situation possible,” New Orleans Saints head coach Kellen Moore told reporters Tuesday. “Certainly we feel like we have the best available here [at camp], so we’ll continue to evaluate that.”
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Added Minnesota Vikings head coach Kevin O’Connell, “My expectation is that we are totally safe, and our folks always handle things so well. And we expect our campus, while we’re hosting our fans, to remain that way.”