How did a lone gunman breach one of New York’s most secure skyscrapers?

The shooting at Midtown Manhattan tower exposes how eliminating threats can be nearly impossible, even in fortified workplaces.

A closed-circuit television image showed the shooter entering the Midtown Manhattan building with a rifle. Photo: Zuma Press via WSJ

The Park Avenue building where a gunman killed four people Monday is fortified more heavily than most. Concrete planters line the sidewalk. Security guards stand watch in the lobby. Video cameras monitor movements. Access procedures require visitors to register in advance, enter through a limited number of doors and pass security gates to reach elevators.

So how did a lone shooter penetrate all of that?

The deadly rush-hour shooting at the Midtown Manhattan skyscraper is spurring a furious review of security procedures inside large US employers, building-security experts say. The attack demonstrated that even a well-guarded workplace is vulnerable to someone striding in with a high-powered M4 rifle, intent on doing harm.

Workers at 345 Park Avenue barricade themselves with an active shooter in the building Picture: Breaking911/X

The gunman, 27-year-old Shane Tamura of Las Vegas, walked into the lobby openly holding the rifle, shooting first an NYPD officer working an off-duty security shift, then an unarmed security guard and a Blackstone executive, police said. Tamura appeared to have shot at one of the roughly waist-high glass turnstiles, an employee of private-equity firm Blackstone said, before making his way onto an elevator and shooting another person on the 33rd floor.

“If you’re encountering a threat actor, an assailant who is willing to trade his life for yours, it’s extremely difficult to defend,” said Tim Gallagher, a former Federal Bureau of Investigation special agent and now co-head of physical security and threat mitigation at the investigations firm Nardello.

In many ways, 345 Park Ave. appeared to do nearly everything right from a security standpoint, Gallagher said. The building — where the National Football League, Blackstone, accounting firm KPMG and real estate management firm Rudin Management have offices — had an off-duty New York City Police Department officer stationed in the lobby. It used an advanced, automated video surveillance system.

A New York Police Department officer stands in front of a bullet-shattered window at 345 Park Avenue building on Monday. Picture: Spencer Platt/Getty Images/AFP

At least one or two security guards manned a front desk. To access a series of elevator banks reaching upper floors, workers had to scan a badge at turnstiles that opened modern, glass gates.

Such a multilayered security program is widely seen as best practice, said Gallagher, who has visited the address multiple times and advised companies that work in the building. “Security is tight,” he said.

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, speaking to CNN, cited the presence of the off-duty police officer as a sign of the building’s robust security. “I don’t know how you get more secure than that,” she said.

Re-evaluating office security

What has rattled professionals across the US is the sense that such a shooting could easily happen in their own offices.

Brian Stephens of Teneo, who works with companies across industries on security matters, said he heard from many clients in the hours after the shooting, including multinationals and real estate owners.

“The simple question is: Is there anything we need to think about differently based on what happened?” said Stephens, a former chief security officer at Bank of America.

The answer, he said, is complicated.

The private-equity firm Blackstone is among the companies with offices in the building. Photo: Michael Nagle/Bloomberg News via WSJ

Securing corporate offices in a dense urban setting such as Manhattan can be particularly difficult. Unlike suburban office parks or other corporate facilities, where individuals might be stopped at a guard station far from a building, companies in a city can do only so much to restrict guests coming and going from a lobby.

Many companies already monitor for threats online, conduct annual safety training with workers and encourage colleagues to speak up if they see something suspicious. But once a suspect takes down lobby security staff, as happened on Monday, it becomes easier to access the office floors.

Some companies are beginning to install artificial-intelligence-enhanced video surveillance software to look for anyone who appears to have a weapon. Such systems can then immediately trigger a building to go into lockdown mode or for staffers to disable elevator service, Stephens said.

The idea is that, “even if he does get inside, he’s not going anywhere within the tower,” Stephens said. Such technology can be expensive and is still evolving, though. “I certainly wouldn’t call it commonplace,” he said.

Trained to ‘run, hide, fight’

Security experts say employees themselves play a critical role in thwarting a workplace attack. Monday’s shooting showed just how practised younger workers are in taking quick action, after growing up with active-shooter drills as a regular part of school life, witnesses and security experts said. Many staffers went immediately into “run, hide, fight” mode when the shooting started. Attempting to barricade doors or hide can be helpful in deterring a shooter in situations where seconds matter, security specialists said.

New York City Mayor Eric Adams, in an interview with Fox News on Tuesday, said the building’s owner, the Rudin family, had created “safe rooms that doubled as bathrooms with bulletproof doors” within the building, and conducted several active-shooter drills. Such measures likely saved lives, Adams said.

Dale Buckner, chief executive of Global Guardian, a security firm that has clients in the building, said he had visited 345 Park Ave. numerous times and had seen the glass turnstiles in the lobby in action. It is unclear whether the gunman broke the turnstiles or accessed the elevators by jumping over them. How he got through, though, is “almost irrelevant,” he said.

“The key takeaway being, we simply need to make it more difficult, and there’s got to be a way to shut down that lobby to minimise his mobility, if you will, when these things happen,” Buckner said.

One additional solution, he said, is for lobby guards to be seated behind bulletproof glass, akin to a model in heavily fortified US embassies overseas, and to have additional layers of security to more easily isolate a shooter.

“That might sound a little too over the top or draconian,” he said. “I think that, inevitably, this is where we’re going to end up.”

Wall Street Journal