Office cleaner describes coming face-to-face with Manhattan shooting suspect
“He shot the door to the closet, and I was so scared,” the woman said.
Midtown Manhattan shooting survivor on coming face-to-face with gunmanThe survivor, who cleaned the office building, said she pleaded for her life as the gunman pointed his gun at her and managed to hide in a supply closet.
John Lamparski/AFP via Getty Images
On Monday afternoon, Sebije Nelovic, a cleaner at 345 Park Avenue in Midtown, Manhattan, began her daily sweep of the glassy high-rise building where she has worked for 27 years.
Two hours into her shift, as she was at work on the 33rd floor, came the sound of gunshots.
In a lengthy statement shared by the 32BJ Service Employees International Union on Thursday, 65-year-old Nelovic described coming face-to-face with Shane Devon Tamura, the 27-year-old gunman who authorities say entered the office tower shortly before 6:30 p.m., armed with a high-powered AR-15-style rifle, and killed four people, including an off-duty New York City police officer.
MORE: Manhattan mass shooting suspect Shane Tamura’s Las Vegas activities investigated
When Nelovic heard the sound of the gunshots on the 33rd floor, she said she left the office she was cleaning and turned the corner where she could see the glass door by the reception desk.
“Suddenly, the glass door was shaking. It started falling down – boom. And this guy came in the middle of the door, and pointed his gun at me,” she said in the statement. “He started shooting around me. I put my hands up and said, ‘I’m a cleaning lady. I’m a cleaning lady.'”
Then Nelovic ran, she said in the statement. She found a closet and locked herself inside.
“I started praying,” she said, as she heard the shooting continue. “He shot the door to the closet, and I was so scared.”
MORE: Manhattan shooting victims: NYPD officer, Blackstone executive among the 4 killed
While hiding in the closet, Nelovic said she texted with her supervisor, but then, afraid that any noise could give away her position, she powered off her cellphone. For two to three long hours, she said she sat in silence and prayed.
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When the gunfire finally ceased, Nelovic said she thought about Julia Hyman, the 27-year-old associate at Rudin Management, who she knew was scheduled to be at her desk that evening on the 33rd floor.
Later on Monday night, Nelovic returned to her Queens home, and surrounded by family, she turned on the television.
“I had to see what happened and why,” she said. “That’s how I found out about Julia.”
Police said Hyman was the last person Tamura shot and killed before taking his own life.
Investigators say they are continuing to look for a motive, but New York City Mayor Eric Adams said it appears Tamura, a former high school football player, was attempting to target the headquarters of the National Football League, located in the 345 Park Ave. building but took the wrong elevator and ended up in the 33rd-floor office of Rudin Management.
In a note found in Tamura’s pocket in the aftermath of the attack, the suspect claimed he suffered from chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a disease linked to repeated hits to the head, often seen in military veterans and athletes, including football players, hockey players and boxers, sources told ABC News. In the note, Tamura asked that his brain be studied, sources said.
It remains unknown if Tamura suffered from CTE, which can’t be diagnosed in a living person with certainty, though doctors may suspect it based on symptoms and a history of head trauma.
A CT senator slept outside. He says the state is failing homeless people
By Livi Stanford | lstanford@courant.com | Hartford Courant staff
PUBLISHED: November 11, 2025 at 5:30 AM EST
Debra Keller remembers sitting in a homeless shelter in Hartford viewing horrific things she never thought she would see.
One man was shot in front of her and stabbings were common. She was living on oxygen in a frail state.
It was a life far removed from the banking and insurance industry where Keller once worked.
Keller found herself homeless at the age of 70 in 2021 after caring for her ill mother who passed away. The bank foreclosed on her mother’s home, leaving her homeless.
“It was frightening,” she said. “You never knew from one day to the next where you would lay your head down at night.”
Bringing awareness to the rising number of homeless in the state and keenly aware of stories like Keller’s who said she was lucky to find housing, State Sen. Saud Anwar slept out in the elements for one night this past Saturday with several others from the nonprofit Hartford Bags of Love. The event aims to highlight deep concerns for the rising number of homeless in the state and the dire need for more funding to keep them warm this winter.
The senator said this year’s statewide point in time count showed nearly a 10% increase to 3,735 people experiencing homelessness. Hundreds of children are currently staying in homeless shelters and thousands of students are identified by their schools as experiencing homelessness, he said.
This is Anwar’s seventh year participating in such an event.
“Homelessness is a symptom of failed policies,” said Anwar. “The failed policies are not having enough affordable homes and not having a safety net for individuals who may have substance abuse and mental health issues. It is having a safe space for victims of domestic violence and having a management strategy for youth who are going through trouble with family not accepting them for LGBTQ status or other challenges that youth are experiencing and that results in them losing their home and safety net.”
Close calls
In the seven years that Anwar has slept out in the elements for one night to bring awareness to homelessness, he remembers one year when he contemplated if he would survive.
Sleeping in 28 degree weather in a sleeping bag on a yoga mat, Anwar could not feel his feet and his hands.
“You sort of become numb and you are in severe pain in your legs because your blood flow is being impacted,” he said. “That night I did not think I would make it. At that moment you are praying to survive the night.”
At this year’s event, his sleep was poor — he slept approximately 30 minutes to two hours before waking up due to noise or feeling cold.
Joining numerous others with Hartford Bags of Love, a nonprofit helping those in need, Anwar slept Saturday night at Nevers Park in South Windsor with a yoga mat and sleeping bag.
The event was also an opportunity to recognize the loss of homeless individuals who died in the state, according to Anwar. Anwar said the lifespan of individuals experiencing homelessness is reduced by 26 to 33 years.
Mark Cabot, co-founder of Hartford Bags of Love, said taking part in the event every year is humbling. This year, he shared the experience with his 6-year-old daughter as they huddled to keep warm in the cold temperatures.
He was reminded of the many questions that swirl in the minds of those who are homeless such as whether they are safe or if someone is going to steal from them or if they are going to get enough sleep.
“It is just a constant reminder why we do the work we do to help those in need,” he said. “It is not a matter of one organization to fix it. It takes all organizations coming together to fix it and support each other.”
Also working with Cornerstone Foundation in Vernon, Cabot said that the need of families experiencing homelessness is great and one the nonprofit is unable to meet.
“We are a triage shelter,” he said. “We have 40 to 45 families every night and we are at capacity.”
Dire need
Anwar said it is critical that more funding is allocated to homelessness.
Gov. Ned Lamont has called a special session this week to consider legislation including a bill to address the housing shortage in Connecticut. The proposed bill includes “incentives to encourage towns to build more housing, provisions for municipal and regional housing growth plans, first-time homebuyer savings accounts and transit-oriented development,” according to the governor’s office.
Anwar said there is simply not enough funding in the new legislation to address the needs in the state.
“There needs to be money allocated toward the immediate needs this winter because this is an emergency situation,” he said, adding that an additional $4 million is needed to take care of individuals experiencing homelessness during the winter months.
The CT Mirror reported that the new housing bill, a replacement for House Bill 5002, which was passed by the legislature but vetoed by Lamont, “uses opt-in measures and incentives to push municipalities to allow more housing — rather than the requirements included in the previous version of the legislation. It also strikes a provision known as ‘fair share.’”
Sarah Fox, CEO of the Connecticut Coalition to End Homelessness, said with the increase in homelessness it is critical that there is more funding to help bring the unsheltered population in from the cold this winter.
She said especially for senior citizens and the disabled, the rent crisis is pushing them into homelessness as they are unable to afford to pay the rents on Social Security.
“We are in the midst of an affordable housing and rental crisis in the state,” she said. “We have more people including senior citizens, and people who are employed who are falling into homelessness than ever before.”
Last year there were 20,000 evictions in the state, according to Fox.
Fox said she recalls families, with vouchers for housing in hand, sitting in shelters unable to find housing.
“We need to bring our neighbors into warmth because it is winter and more people are outside than ever before,” she said. “We are dealing with the uncertainties at the federal level and then the impact of the disinvestment in affordable housing has long hit home with our neighbors. More people working full-time jobs and elderly people are falling into homelessness. It is closely intertwined with poverty.”
U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development is proposing major changes to the agency’s Continuum of Care Program that serves 9,000 people in the state to help keep people housed and reduce costly emergency system use, according to the Connecticut Coalition to End Homelessness.
Those proposed actions could “gut 50-70% of HUD funding, displacing 9,000 people and eliminating thousands of housing units, with older adults, people with disabilities and families most at risk,” according to the Connecticut Coalition to End Homelessness.
Keller lived in several shelters from 2021-23 before receiving aid to find her own apartment.
She also advocates for more funding for the homeless, stressing there are not enough resources. She said you have to advocate for yourself to make your way out.
“You have to be in the right place at the right time and be proactive,” she said. “You can’t just sit there and say, ‘poor me, I am homeless.’ You have to do something about it.”
West Bend man accused; exposing himself, taking hidden camera pictures
By Sam Kraemer and FOX6 News Digital Team
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West Bend man accused; exposing himself
A former Froedtert employee faces 47 felonies after prosecutors said he used a hidden camera to record his coworkers in the bathroom.
WEST BEND, Wis. – A former Froedtert West Bend Hospital employee faces 47 felonies after prosecutors said he used a hidden camera to record his coworkers in the bathroom.
Outside his West Bend apartment, Greg Emmerich tries to comprehend that the neighbor he once respected now faces 47 felonies.
“He was probably the most upstanding guy that I ever met,” said Emmrich. “I honestly was praying that it was a mistake.”
Greg Emmerich
The accused is Steven Weis – and he faces the following counts:
- Exposing intimate parts (two counts)
- Stalking (four counts)
- Capture an intimate representation without consent (41 counts)
Prosecutors said 45-year-old Steven Weis stalked three of his neighbors, including two children. One of them told police Weis masturbated in front of them from his apartment window and complained to their mother about Weis taking pictures.
After Weis consented to a search of his computer West Bend police said they found more than 10,000 photos of the three victims. More evidence led them to Weis’s day job in IT at Froedtert West Bend Hospital.
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Froedtert West Bend Hospital
Weis told investigators every day at work started the same. In the morning, he’s come into the bathroom with a small camera. He’d install it using Velcro just beneath the sink and let it record all day. Then, he takes the camera on his way out.
“It’s shocking. It’s tough. It’s disturbing,” said Emmrich.
Investigators said they found videos showing 99 different hospital employees using the bathroom dating back to April. None knew they were being recorded.
According to a criminal complaint, When West Bend police questioned Weis, he “said he had been recording at the Clinic from about 2015 through 2019. He admitted he never received permission to record any individuals at the Clinic,” the complaint says. The complaint said Weis told police he’d save the video that included attractive women and masturbated to them. Adding, he’d go into the bathroom, look for strands of their hair and collect them.
Law enforcement conducted a search of Weis’ residence. They located a safe that had DVDs and other computer backups, including hard drives. They also “found hair strands secured to paper that were found in a safe. The defendant said if he found a female attractive and they would exit the bathroom, he would look on the floor for hair strands. He would collect them and bring them home,” the complaint says.
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“It makes you wonder, you know, how good do you really know somebody,” said Emmerich.
A search of Weis’ laptop found folders which “contained videos and still images from the videos captured at the West Bend Clinic,” the complaint says. A detective noted, “there were hundreds if not thousands of hidden camera videos.”
So far, police have identified 29 of 99 victims at the hospital.
Froedtert West Bend issued the following statement on this matter:
“We are aware of the situation and have terminated the staff member in question. We are working with local law enforcement to identify possible victims and provide resources to help them heal.”
Weis made his initial appearance in Washington County court on Monday, July 31 and is due back in court on Thursday. Cash bond was set at $100,000.
A Survivors Story: Immacule Ilibagiza’s passage to forgiveness
Forgiving the men who killed my parents and brother was a process, a journey into deeper and deeper prayer,” Immaculée Ilibagiza told me as we sat in the lobby of a Manhattan hotel last June. Intense prayer, she said, had helped her survive the three months that she and several other women lay crammed into a small bathroom in the home of a Protestant pastor near her home in the western province of Kibuye, on Lake Kivu. Pastor Murinzi, a Hutu, did not share in the ethnic hatred between Hutu and Tutsi that burst forth in Rwanda in 1994. He took in the eight Tutsi women who begged for refuge at his home. Immaculée’s father had sent her running to the pastor’s house when a crowd of machete-armed Hutu bore down on the family’s home in Mataba in western Rwanda. But her father did not survive, nor did her mother, who was chopped down in front of their house, nor did a beloved brother, Damascene, who was tracked down and murdered weeks later after a presumed friend betrayed his hiding place.
Led by Faith
Ms. Ilibagiza has described her experiences in two books, Left to Tell and Led by Faith. During our interview, she described some steps of her interior journey: from hatred and a desire for revenge to compassion and forgiveness. Her faith, she said, was rooted largely in devotion to Mary. As she recited the rosary, a verse from the Lord’s Prayer (“Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us”) helped to begin an inner transformation even as she lay in hiding. Those days were filled with terror, because machete-wielding Hutu frequently searched the pastor’s house.
“They searched everywhere, even in the ceilings,” she said. “I couldn’t imagine that they would not notice the door of the bathroom in the pastor’s bedroom, behind which we lay crouched.” They came very close. One day, as they were about to open that door, which was all that stood between the women and sudden death, Immaculée heard the searchers say to the pastor, “We trust you.” They left, but returned frequently in a less trusting mood. In the bedroom Immaculée had seen a large wardrobe closet; she asked the pastor to push it in front of the bathroom door. At first he refused, saying it would make no difference. But sensing that the wardrobe might be the key to survival, she went down on her knees and begged him. He relented and pushed the wardrobe against the door behind which the group lay, hardly daring to breathe. Conversation was impossible except in whispers. A man working in and around the house grew suspicious and often passed by their window, listening for voices.
Immaculée still had the red and white rosary her father had given her before rushing her to the pastor’s house. Every day upon waking at 6 a.m., she recited the rosary of the seven sorrows, beginning with Simeon’s words to Mary that a sword would pierce her heart. In our conversation, she stressed that she said these prayers from deep within, meaning deeply each word. Again and again, “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those” resonated ever more deeply in her heart. “If God really is the father of everyone, including the Hutu who were carrying out the slaughter and looking for me by name—I could hear them calling me as they periodically circled the house,” she said. “How could I keep wishing I could destroy them?” She felt she would be lying to God. She also saw an inner image of Jesus on the cross and heard his words, “Forgive them, they do not know what they are doing.”
The genocide officially ended with the arrival of French troops in her part of Rwanda, but Immaculée still experienced moments of terror when her faith served as protection. French soldiers loaded several dozen Tutsi into the back of a covered truck to take them to the nearest French camp for survivors. But to their horror the truck halted within a few hundred yards of the camp; a group of Hutu men with machetes stood in the way. The driver told them all to get out, for he had orders to avoid all conflict. Feeling betrayed by the French officer in charge, they got out, and the truck drove away at full speed.
As the frightened group began walking, Immaculée noticed one Hutu in particular who, machete in hand, stared at her menacingly. Instead of averting her eyes, she returned his look and prayed to the Holy Spirit, “You can do it,” the “it” meaning “preserve me.” The man seemed to be trying to face her down. “I could feel him begin to change, and I thought, You are a human being like me.” Finally, she said, “he blinked and turned away his gaze.” The group made it safely to the camp, a poorly provisioned holding area for temporary use until Tutsi could be transported to a larger and more fully equipped camp. At last they were safe.
Here, as on other occasions, Immaculée felt a strong sense of divine providence at work. In the first camp, she met Florence, a young woman who had been attacked with machetes and thrown off a cliff; Florence survived by lying motionless under dead bodies. She told Immaculée, “I can only believe that God spared me for something.” To which Immaculée replied, “You’re like me, you’ve been left to tell our story.” For her, that story involved spreading the message of God’s all-embracing love and forgiveness.
The Necessity of Forgiveness
One of the most dramatic moments in Immaculée’s journey toward forgiveness occurred after the genocide finally ended. Felicien, the man who killed her mother and who was personally known to her family as an upstanding member of the community, was in a local jail. Immaculée felt impelled to visit him. By then, she said in the interview, “the work of forgiveness was almost done.” Forgiveness had to apply to the Hutu killers in general, but especially to Felicien. She described waiting for the jailers to bring Felicien into the room: “I wasn’t quite sure whether I was still going to feel forgiving toward him—I might look at him and change my mind.” But once they were face to face, she said, “the forgiveness all became normal.” She asked him: “How can you have done this? Killing so many people, you can’t be at peace.” In rags, he seemed small and confused. “I wanted to reach out to him,” she said. “I cried, and then he himself started to cry.”
The official in charge of the jail, a Tutsi who was a survivor like Immaculée and who was present during the meeting, grew angry, saying: “How can you do this, forgive the killer of your own mother? Are you crazy?” He gave her permission to slap him and spit on him, but she refused. Instead, her act of forgiveness began to affect the official himself. Later, she heard that he had said, “I will never forget that woman.” While she was working at the United Nations office in Kigali, the capital, the official came to see her. “You don’t know what you did to me, when you went to the jail and forgave Felicien,” he told her. “I was shocked.” But he had learned from her encounter with Felicien the necessity for forgiveness.
While in Kigali, Immaculée first felt a need to write about her survival and her journey toward forgiveness of those who took part in the genocide. Co-workers urged her to write it down. Good schooling and two years of university education had given her the skills to undertake the project. One morning, she said, “I just woke up and started typing on a computer, imagining what it would be for someone who knew nothing of the genocide—but also for surviving family members, like a brother who had been studying in another country when the killing began.” The first draft took only three weeks. “I’d jump up at 2 a.m., cook a little food and sit right down to write. It was like an obsession,” she said. “I couldn’t stop.” When she finished, however, she put the manuscript away and did not look at it again for four years. Something she called “a voice of discouragement” gnawed at her: Who do you think you are, an African woman, getting a book published? The same voice of discouragement almost led her to abandon herself to despair while hiding at the pastor’s house. But another voice, of hope, proved stronger.
The possibility of publication never left her. On moving to New York in 1998 to work at the United Nations headquarters, a friend invited her to a workshop given by Wayne Dyer, an author and speaker in the area of self-development. After his presentation, she spoke with him. Learning with surprise that she was a Rwandan genocide survivor, he said, “You look happy, after seeing so much horror there.” She told him, “It was God who protected me.” He asked if she could write a book. “When I told him I had just finished the latest draft, he asked me to send it to him.” He in turn sent it to a publishing house that assigned her an editor who has continued to work with her—on four books so far.
Immaculée travels to Rwanda several times a year. She said that the government is emphasizing forgiveness as a national priority to ease ethnic tensions. But on a personal level, she said, “for Tutsi to be able to forgive is an individual matter, at the level of the heart.” Many survivors still have visible machete wounds on their bodies, in addition to wounds of the human spirit from that time when neighbor often turned against neighbor. A report last year by the British Broadcasting Corporation noted that even in the town of Mataba, ethnic hatreds were evident in secondary schools, with Hutu students often harassing Tutsi students. Last year, a parliamentary committee researched 32 schools and found ethnic hatred prevalent in most of them. The report concludes: “Rwanda has made considerable progress in promoting co-existence between its people, but there is obviously a long way to go.” Through her message of forgiveness, Immaculée is part of that “way.”
In June, Immaculée was working on her latest book, The Seeds of Forgiveness. In talks around the United States and in other countries she has emphasized that her own personal experience in Rwanda has ramifications far beyond forgiving the perpetrators of genocide. Instead, the message of forgiveness needs to be fostered in the human heart on a broad level that touches people’s everyday lives, not just in times of crisis. After a presentation in the United States, said Immaculée, “One woman told me that she had not spoken to her mother in 20 years. ‘But now, I want to call my mother and be reconciled,’ the woman said.” That comment underscores the universality of Ms. Ilibagiza’s message and the eager response of some who hear it.
