After one of the deadliest racist massacres in the nation’s recent history, Americans were forced to come to grips with yet another brutal hate crime, as officials called for action to stop the spread of violent ideology online.
“We must all work together to address the hate that remains a stain on the soul of America,” President Biden said on Sunday, calling for “federal action” to prevent mass shootings like the one in Buffalo, New York, over the weekend.
On Saturday, Payton S. Gendron, 18, shot 13 people at a Tops supermarket in east Buffalo, killing 10, police say. Almost all the victims were Black—shoppers, grocery workers, and a security guard who tried to confront the attacker and paid with his life.
“This individual came here with the express purpose of taking as many Black lives as he could,” says Mayor Byron Brown, who is Buffalo’s first Black mayor.
Before the killings, Gendron is believed to have posted a lengthy, racist screed online, expressing admiration for a White supremacist ideology known as replacement theory, which falsely claims the existence of a scheme to “replace” White Americans—and voters—with immigrants or people of color.
The attack was the deadliest mass shooting in the United States this year, joining a grim roster of other racist massacres in recent years, including the killing of 9 Black parishioners at a church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015; an antisemitic rampage in the Tree of Life synagogue in 2018 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, that left 11 people dead; and an attack at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, in 2019, in which the man charged had expressed hatred of Latinos and killed more than 20 people.
Gendron, who is White, picked that particular Tops store, police say, because it is in an area known for its large Black population, going so far as to visit the neighborhood the day before the attack in what authorities describe as a reconnaissance mission. Gendron traveled halfway across New York State, from his home in a small town near Binghamton.
Gendron wore body armor and used a semiautomatic rifle in the attack, according to Mark Poloncarz, the Erie County executive. After briefly threatening to take his own life, Gendron surrendered to police and was charged with first-degree murder. He pleaded not guilty.
The dead include a retired Buffalo police officer, Aaron Salter Jr., 55, who worked at the grocery store as a security guard and is being hailed as a hero for confronting the gunman, and Ruth Whitfield, an 86-year-old grandmother of eight. Some died running errands: Celestine Chaney, 65, for example, who wanted to get strawberries to make shortcakes, or Roberta Drury, 32, who was getting food for dinner. Heyward Patterson, 67, died while helping to put groceries into another shopper’s car.
Gendron livestreamed his attack, the police say, capturing the images of chaos he caused with a camera affixed to his helmet. The video was broadcast on Twitch, a livestreaming site owned by Amazon that’s popular with gamers, though the site took the channel offline a couple of minutes after the attack started. Still, a snippet of the video of the shooting was viewed more than 3 million times on a site called Streamable before it was removed.
Nearly a year before the mass shooting, Gendron’s words had caused alarm elsewhere. Police say Gendron was picked up at his high school in Conklin, New York, last June by state police after making a threatening remark and was taken to a hospital for a mental health evaluation.
Responding to a question for a class project about his post-graduation plans, Gendron had said his involved a murder-suicide, according to a law enforcement official familiar with the case.
But Gendron described the remark as a joke, the official says. And after the evaluation, which lasted about a day and a half, he was released, according to Joseph Gramaglia, the Buffalo police commissioner.
Some people in Gendron’s hometown say he displayed signs of rebellion and odd behavior, including a moment after in-person schooling resumed when he wore a hazmat suit to class.
“He wore the entire suit: boots, gloves, everything,” says Nathan Twitchell, 19, a former classmate at Susquehanna Valley High School.
Kolton Gardner, 18, of Conklin, who attended middle school and high school with Gendron, describes him as “definitely a little bit of an outcast.”
With President Biden set to visit Buffalo on Tuesday, many Black residents in the east Buffalo neighborhood where the shooting took place expressed anguish and frustration that they couldn't feel safe where they live.
For more than a decade, Marlene Brown, 58, who is Black, has lived just blocks away from the Tops supermarket where the shooting happened.
“We want to be protected and treated like we matter,” she says, “without it taking a White supremacist shooting up our community.”