Claim: The Midtown Manhattan shooter shouted “Free Palestine” while shooting people
Verdict: False
On July 28th, 2025 a man named Shane Devon Tamura opened fire in a midtown Manhattan skyscraper, killing four people and then himself. In the aftermath, his motivation became fairly clear: a former high school football player, he left a note attacking the NFL, whose offices are in the skyscraper he attacked; it appears he started his attack in the lobby, and then took the wrong elevator and missed their offices.
But Laura Loomer has other ideas.
Attached is a short (37 second) clip of a woman claiming to be a witness saying that the shooter was shouting “Free Palestine”
To be clear, there is no evidence of this. The killer was not wearing anything on his head, and he was not Middle Eastern. And his motivations are clear: he had two notes on him explaining them.
But that leaves the mystery of what this photo, constantly attached to the case, represents:
Initially claimed to be the shooter, and then claimed to be an accomplice, every citation of this story comes from the New York Post, who claim that two protestors were arrested when they wandered into the active shooting situation and started saying “Free Palestine! I’m not the shooter!” The Murdoch-owned Post is obviously not a reliable source, but they’re not the source of this image. But screencaps of the original story let us find it:
The story has now changed completely, and no longer has the photo, and the original does not appear to be in the Wayback Machine, though we can recognize it’s the same as the url still has the original headline, to reflect new information. It also has an editor’s note attached:
It appears that two people, a woman and the man pictured, were taken into custody by police, possibly for entering an active crime scene. One of them may have yelled something during this time. Neither were tied in any way to the shooting, whose motive is very easily established as rage against the NFL. AMNY retracted this story and the photo, but it had spread onto the New York Post, and to X/Twitter, where it was combined with the false witness testimony video shared by Laura Loomer to form a narrative