A gunman barged into a New York City office building on Monday evening and killed four people. The victims were Wesley LePatner, a mother, wife and employee of the company Blackstone, who co-workers described as “brilliant, generous, passionate and warm. Didarul Islam, a father to two boys with a third child on the way, a husband and an NYPD officer; an immigrant from Bangladesh who was called a “hero” by New York City officials in the wake of the tragedy. Julia Hyman, a brilliant young real estate professional who a former professor described as “determined, strong and warm" and Aland Etienne, a security guard whose brother told CNN that Aland was “a light in our lives.”
You are reading this on a sports website because the killer, whom I would prefer not to name, decided to link this despicable act to his belief—and I emphasize that word, belief—that he had chronic traumatic encephalopathy, better known as CTE. His belief manifested into a warped crusade against the NFL, which is headquartered inside the building the gunman targeted. The killer played high school football and had a documented history of mental health concerns, according to multiple reports, though CTE cannot be diagnosed in a living individual. He took his own life in hopes that his brain might be studied.
Unfortunately, this is where we have diverged, away from the honorable and beautiful lives that were lost. Away from Craig Clementi, a wounded employee of the NFL who, according to The Athletic, managed to warn many of his colleagues and save countless lives in the process. Away from the idea that this is symptomatic of a far larger disease that has nothing to do with sports or head trauma.
Please let me be clear in what I am about to say: This is not a defense of the NFL or an effort to defend its history of handling cases of head trauma. Instead, this is merely an expression of disappointment in a world that seems to hand shooters exactly what they had hoped for by committing the act in the first place. By even entertaining this narrative—that the shooter was a football player, interviewing his high school football coach, and examining exactly what he had hoped to publicize via a note in his wallet—we are lending credence to someone whose solution to his problem was to take the lives of innocent people. People who had loving families. People who defended the helpless. People who had extremely bright futures. Anyone who believes that removing others from Earth is required to spread a message should have the rest of their thesis wholly disqualified. Full stop.
Never mind the idea that, as ESPN reported a year ago, fears of CTE often outpace what we can prove scientifically. We read the horrors of life with traumatic brain injuries without the fine print or the nuance. You can read the entire story, though one subset stays with me whenever we experience a spike in interest about head injuries, football, and the consequences of continuing to play a dangerous game.
In March 2019, a letter signed by 61 researchers was published in The Lancet, one of the world’s leading medical journals. Titled “Primum non nocere: a call for balance when reporting on CTE,” the letter criticized not just the media’s coverage but, more pointedly, the medical and scientific communities. It emphasized the many unknowns that surrounded CTE and urged that “distorted reporting” might have “dire consequences,” especially on people with treatable conditions.
The letter concluded: “We propose that the principle of, first, to do no harm, is used when communicating on CTE, whatever the platform. In particular, the many remaining uncertainties should always be acknowledged. Otherwise, the risk of doing harm is very real.”
It’s unfair to speculate as to whether the narrativization of CTE placed the killer into a mindset that illuminated Monday’s actions as his only solution. But our inability to talk about CTE with all of its proper underpinnings is not unlike our failure to call Monday’s occurrence what it was: An individual, clearly in need of help and guidance, attaching his crusade to something larger in the hopes of being understood or excused. Anything else is just superfluous; window dressing obscuring the heart of the matter.
CTE and the NFL have nothing to do with all of the promise, hope and good that was removed from the Earth. Inferring that certain symptoms of CTE could somehow cause a person to do something like this is, I feel, irresponsible. The shooter wasn’t any more of a high school football player, as he’s being referred to in headlines, than he was an employee of the Las Vegas casino that paid him for security services up until this heinous act.
In the wake of other instances of profound tragedy, our internal compass tends to lead us in the right direction eventually. We shouldn’t comb through manifestos or rambling notes looking for a point or conclusion or clue because there is no way those ideas are not, in the least, heavily distorted or downright misguided. Looking at this as even the slightest inkling of a football problem or a CTE problem encourages others in extreme distress to believe they’ll be heard with similar efforts.
Hopefully, we all put our energy into rallying around the victims. The families of the victims. The employees in that office building who may never feel safe at work again and, frankly, anyone who feels unease in a public space due to the all-too-familiar fear that someone who shouldn’t have access to a firearm, someone in distress, someone weighted down by the world who doesn’t see another option, could be in their midst. Those are the points that we should be trying to make today, tomorrow and forever. That is where our attention needs to lie.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Let’s Focus on Monday’s Shooting Victims, Not a Killer’s CTE Crusade Against the NFL .
