Julia Hyman was working late at the real estate office on the 33rd floor of a Midtown tower, and the gunman was apparently lost.
There are indications that the gunman had gone to the Park Avenue office building to settle a grudge with one of the other tenants, the National Football League. A note found in his wallet indicated that he held the N.F.L. responsible for what he believed was an injury to his brain. But after he unleashed a fusillade in the lobby, it appears he took the elevator to the wrong floor.
There he encountered Ms. Hyman, 27, an associate at Rudin Management, a long-established real estate company where she was one of the newer employees. He fired into the offices at random, the police said, killing Ms. Hyman.
Hers was the fourth life that the gunman, identified by the police as Shane Tamura, a 27-year-old from Las Vegas, took that day. He had already shot a police officer, an executive and a security guard. The fifth life was his own: He turned the gun on himself there on the 33rd floor.
Ms. Hyman was a New Yorker, a graduate of the Riverdale Country School in the Bronx, where she was not just a varsity athlete in soccer, swimming and lacrosse, but the captain of all three teams her senior year, according to a letter sent to the student body on Tuesday by Kari Ostrem, the head of school.
At Riverdale, she was a leader of the peer mentoring program and received the school’s prestigious Founders Award, presented to “that young woman who best demonstrated outstanding ability, leadership and sportsmanship and the qualities of hard work, excellent attitude and responsibility to her teammates and school,” Ms. Ostrem’s letter said.
“We are simply heartbroken by this loss, and will forever remember Julia for her light, her bright smile and infectious laugh, and the kindness and sense of community that she brought to school every day,” she wrote. “This incident has truly shaken this community and our entire city to its core.”
Her family declined to comment through a spokesman.
Brian Carver and Cat Crocker, who were her deans at Riverdale, said in a joint statement that Ms. Hyman stood out for her “modesty and humility, her desire to see others succeed, and her grit and tenacity in the face of adversity.” Milton Sipp, the head of Riverdale’s middle school, wrote that she had a “heart of gold.”
In a statement, Rudin confirmed that an employee had been killed and called her a “cherished” colleague. She was a 2020 graduate of Cornell University’s Peter and Stephanie Nolan School of Hotel Administration in Ithaca, N.Y., where she appeared to have been a member of the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority, according to information on her Facebook page. She had started working at Rudin last November, according to her LinkedIn profile.
In a statement, Michael I. Kotlikoff, the president of Cornell, said that Ms. Hyman had graduated summa cum laude, with a major in hotel and restaurant administration and a minor in real estate.
“We are devastated,” he wrote.
Susan C. Beachy contributed research. Maria Cramer and Taylor Robinson and contributed reporting.
Sarah Maslin Nir is a Times reporter covering anything and everything New York … and sometimes beyond.
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