Word Smith: CTE
Before citing details of the tragedy in NYC on July 28, 2025, it is key to note that there are several organizations and resourses that use the initial CTE out there.
There are other organizations and human conditions using the expression, CTE, which are mentioned below:
Career & Technical Education
The one most familiar to me is the CTE expression in educational circles: it refers to Career & Technical Education. As a teacher of business management in a World IB program in Portland, OR, the letters CTE are near and dear to me. Classes such as Culinary Arts, Business Management, Computer Programming, Construction Management, Teacher Education, Audio Engineering, Automotive Engineering, and Media Arts (yearbook and school newspaper) are revered parts of the high school curriculum. AND they have direct pathways to university and Community College programs.
Common Table Expressions (CTE)
Common Table Expressions (CTEs) Ofter used in Structured Quiry Language (SQL) exercises:
CTE: Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy [1]
C.T.E., or chronic traumatic encephalopathy, is caused by an accumulation of percussive blows to the head. There have been cases linked to all levels of ice hockey, rugby, football, wrestling and soccer. The blows needn’t be violent collisions that cause concussions. Rather, the disease seems to progress with both the number of hits and the cumulative impact of all those hits.
Dark Matter
The gunman who opened fire in a Manhattan office building had a note in his wallet claiming that years of playing football had left him with a brain disease known as C.T.E. He inveighed against the N.F.L., which has an office in the building, though none of the four people he killed worked there.
In the end, the gunman, Shane Tamura, shot himself in the chest. “Study my brain please,” the note said. “I’m sorry.”
We won’t know until experts examine his brain whether Tamura had C.T.E. But we know he played football, the sport most associated with the disease, through high school.
Today’s newsletter explores what we know about CTE and its connections to football and violence.
What causes C.T.E.?
While many sports have players who experience CTE, most of the research has been on football players, as the chart below shows:
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| Source: Daneshvar, D.H., Nair, E.S., Baucom, Z.H. et al. (2023) | By The New York Times |
In a 2017 study, a neuropathologist examined the brains of 111 dead N.F.L. players. All but one had C.T.E.
Tamura never made it to the N.F.L. But studies have also found C.T.E. in people who played contact sports in their youth. A 2023 study of 152 athletes who died before age 30 showed that more than 40 percent had C.T.E.
What about the NFL?
Tamura’s note accused the National Football League of concealing the danger of football in favor of profits.
Indeed, the league spent years denying the link between football and brain trauma, and it presented flawed research to bolster its claims, a Times investigation found in 2016. Some former players compared the NFL to “Big Tobacco,” which had for years used bad science to cover up the harm to human lungs that cigarettes cause.
Over the past decade, the NFL has changed its stance and added rules to reduce the risk of severe head injuries. Last season, concussions were at a record low. Still, the disease may be the unavoidable result of a game in which players slam into one another on every snap.
C.T.E. and violence
Doctors can diagnose C.T.E. in someone only after they have died. Because of that, identifying symptoms is difficult. But athletes who were later found to have the disease had displayed similar traits, including impulsive behavior, depression, cognitive impairment and suicidal thoughts.
My colleague Ken Belson, who has covered the disease for years, wrote about notable instances of violence by former football players with C.T.E. For instance, Aaron Hernandez, a former New England Patriots tight end, shot and killed an acquaintance and later killed himself in prison. Like Tamura, the former N.F.L. players Dave Duerson and Junior Seau shot themselves in the chest, which allowed researchers to study their brains.
Experts said it would take several weeks or months to determine whether Tamura had C.T.E. They said that, while Tamura’s death fits a pattern, they were hesitant to attribute his attack solely to C.T.E., because violence is a complicated matter that resists simple explanations.
“Mental health issues come from a lot of different places, not just from brain injuries or C.T.E.,” said Chris Nowinski, co-founder of a nonprofit that supports athletes affected by the disease. “But I also know the history of this issue, and it’s something that keeps me up at night.”[1]
And now to the human tragedy in New York City…
Wesley LePatner, One of Blackstone’s Highest-Ranking Women Killed in Shooting [2]
By Miriam Gottfried July 29, 2025
Wesley Le Patner, CEO of Blackstone’s real-estate megafund, took cover behind a pillar during the attack on the Blackstone headquarters, she did not make it out alive.
LePatner was a star in Blackstone’s vast real-estate business, rising to oversee one of its major strategies and one of its biggest funds. She was killed Monday evening in the lobby of the company’s building, shot down by a gunman allegedly angry at the National Football League, another tenant of the building. LePatner took cover behind a pillar as the shooter sprayed the lobby with gunfire. The shooter killed four people before killing himself. An NFL employee was injured and in critical condition.
LePatner, 43 years old, was Blackstone’s global head of Core+ real estate, heading up less risky, lower-returning investments across Blackstone’s $325 billion property business. She also served as chief executive of Breit, the company’s real-estate megafund aimed at individual investors launched in 2017.
Blackstone President Jonathan Gray teared up on a call with employees Tuesday morning as he spoke about LePatner. Most of the company’s New York employees stayed home Tuesday as its Park Avenue office building was closed to tenants while investigators combed through the crime scene.
In an interview Tuesday with The Wall Street Journal, Gray said he had seen LePatner earlier Monday at the weekly meeting of Blackstone’s real-estate investment committee. Her business was dealing with a difficult issue, but she made it clear she had it under control.
“She just instilled such a sense of confidence in her,” Gray said, adding that she was one of the most universally liked people at the firm.
“There was no edge to her,” he said. “She wanted other people to win.”
The shooting unfolded during the evening rush at around 6:30 p.m. LePatner was on her way out of the office to meet a colleague for a drink, according to a person familiar with the matter. Her colleague came down in an elevator to meet her and saw her lying on the floor.
Gray was up in his office, which sits on the 44th floor, and started receiving reports from colleagues that LePatner had been shot. He said no other Blackstone employees were injured. Blackstone Chief Executive Officer Stephen Schwarzman wasn’t in the building.
A Yale graduate, LePatner started at Blackstone in 2014. She had previously spent 11 years working in various real-estate roles at Goldman Sachs. She lived on Manhattan’s Upper East Side with her husband, Evan LePatner, managing partner of private-equity firm Courizon Partners, and their two children, a girl and a boy.
She rose to become one of Blackstone’s highest-ranking women. She counted Kathleen McCarthy, global co-head of the company’s prominent real-estate business, as a mentor. LePatner became CEO of Breit in January when Frank Cohen, another mentor, stepped down.
McCarthy said she had known LePatner for over 20 years, since they worked together as analysts at Goldman. It took her two tries to convince LePatner to join Blackstone, but the opportunity to build the Core+ business essentially from scratch finally won her over.
“This is a person who was the source of so much good and light in the world, who herself was so accomplished, and yet was the highest integrity, most supportive colleague and friend,” McCarthy said in an interview with the Journal. “It’s so rare to have those things in combination.”
Throughout the company, LePatner was seen as a selfless advocate for other women, helping them get promoted, manage office politics and celebrate their achievements.
LePatner’s father was a partner and head of the international insolvency group at law firm Paul Hastings, and her mother was a lawyer specializing in real estate, according to her 2006 wedding announcement in the New York Times. She met her husband on the first day of their freshman year at Yale.
“We cannot properly express the grief we feel upon the sudden and tragic loss of Wesley,” the LePatner family said in a statement. “She was the most loving wife, mother, daughter, sister and relative, who enriched our lives in every way imaginable. To so many others, she was a beloved, fiercely loyal and caring friend, and a driven and extraordinarily talented professional and colleague.”
LePatner served on the boards of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Abraham Joshua Heschel School, the UJA-Federation of New York and Yale University Library Council. She was a member of the Advisory Board of Governors of the National Association of Real Estate Investment.
In 2023, she received the Alan C. Greenberg Young Leadership Award from the UJA-Federation of New York. In a speech at the event, Gray joked that she was a giant of the real estate industry, despite being only about 5 feet tall. He also spoke about her career ascendance and her support for other women of Wall Street, saying “she pays it forward from generation to generation.”[2]
Write to Miriam Gottfried at Miriam.Gottfried@wsj.com
References:
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/29/business/nyc-shooting-note-cte-explained.html NYT article, July 30, 2025 by Tom Wright-Piersanti.
[2] https://www.wsj.com/finance/who-is-wesley-lepatner-blackstone-executive-nyc-shooting-5e08d511?mod=newsarchive_trending_now_article_pos1 Wall Street Journal article, July 30, 2025 by Miriam Gottfried.
Henry E. Hooper 