The New Yorker:

I met Wesley in 1985, during the summer we both turned four. Until last Monday, our lives always seemed to run on parallel tracks.

By Michael Schulman

There is not a time in the life that I can remember that did not include Wesley Mittman. She was always there, a blazing point on the map of my social world, even if she was off living her life while I was living mine. We were Upper East Side kids, born two weeks apart. We met the summer we both turned four, in 1985, at a nursery-school camp at the 92nd Street Y. I can picture her face then clearly: small, bunchy, lit up with wild, happy eyes and an outsize smile, haloed with Slinky-like curls of dirty-blond hair. After that, we went to elementary school through high school together at Horace Mann, in Riverdale, where she grew into a five-foot dynamo. She studied hard, got sterling grades, and seemed to excel at anything put in her path. We ended up being college classmates, at Yale, and by the time we graduated we’d spent the entirety of our education together. Our journeys through life ran on parallel tracks, and I assumed that they always would.

Last Monday, a twenty-seven-year-old man who had driven from Las Vegas walked into the office tower at 345 Park Avenue with an assault rifle he’d bought from his supervisor at a casino and killed five people. They included a police officer named Didarul Islam; Aland Etienne, an unarmed security guard; Julia Hyman, a young employee at Rudin Management; and Wesley, who was an executive at the investment firm Blackstone. The fifth person he killed was himself. It was the deadliest shooting in New York City in twenty-five years. A note found in the gunman’s wallet indicated that he had suffered debilitating brain trauma from playing high-school football and had come to target the National Football League, which is headquartered in the same building. He wanted his brain studied.

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