The gunman who killed 10 people in a racist attack at an upstate New York grocery store appears to have had the name of a white woman who was run over at a Christmas parade in Wisconsin last year scrawled on his gun.
Photos of the rifle used by Payton Gendron, 18, in the live-streamed massacre show the misspelled name of Virginia Sorenson.
The gunman who killed 10 people in a racist attack at an upstate New York grocery store appears to have had the name of a white woman who was run over at a Christmas parade in Wisconsin last year scrawled on his gun.
Photos of the rifle used by Payton Gendron, 18, in the live-streamed massacre show the misspelled name of Virginia Sorenson.
Buffalo police did not respond to questions about the writing on the gun, the Daily Beast reports.
Photos of the rifle used in the shooting appear to show Virginia Sorenson’s misspelled name along with the N-word written across the barrel.
Sorenson was killed on November 21 during the Waukesha Christmas parade attack.
She was one of four members of the ‘Dancing Grannies’ that were mowed down by Darrell Brooks, who had espoused his own controversial views about race.
In a Facebook post from June 9, 2020, Brooks wrote: ‘LEARNED ND TAUGHT BEHAVIOR!! so when we start bakk knokkin white people TF out ion wanna hear it…the old white ppl 2, KNOKK DEM TF OUT!! PERIOD..’ followed by a middle finger and expletive emoji.
The posts were among several that emerged in the wake of his arrest after he drove his red Ford SUV in a crowd of kids and elderly dancing groups during the parade in the Milwaukee suburb.
Waukesha police later determined that Brooks had not planned the attack and that he did not seek to target any specific ethnic or racial group.
On Saturday evening, Payton Gendron pled not guilty to one first degree murder charge for his supermarket rampage.
Gendron, of Conklin, New York, was barefoot, masked and wearing a paper smock.
He told the judge that he understood the charge against and was not guilty at his arraignment.
He has only been charged with one count of first-degree murder.
Erie County District Attorney John Flynn said the judge ordered a forensic examination and ordered him held without bail.
‘We have taken the necessary steps to get him behind bars,’ he said. ‘That was justice. Getting that first murder charge filed immediately.’
The DA said that they are working with federal authorities to bring further terrorism, hate crime and murder charges.
Gendron’s 180-page Google Drive document detailed his twisted reasons for carrying out Saturday’s massacre at the Top Market supermarket.
A large part of the manifesto focused on the ‘great replacement theory.’
Gendron said he’d chosen to target the upstate New York store because it sat in the zip code 14208, which he said ‘has the highest black percentage that is close to where I live.’
He included a rudimentary map of the store, but didn’t name it prior to the shooting, saying he didn’t want to tip anyone off should his manifesto end up in the hands of law enforcement.
The manifesto said that he’d been radicalized entirely by the internet – rather than anyone he’d met in real life – and added that he’d been inspired by Brenton Tarrant.
Tarrant is a white supremacist who live-streamed himself murdering 51 Muslims at a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019.
Gendron said: ‘The truth is my personal life and experiences are of no value.’
Gendron said Tarrant ‘radicalized him the most’ while discussing what had spurred him to shoot 13 people, 10 of them fatally.
Also named as an inspiration in the manifesto was white supremacist mass-murderer Dylann Roof, who killed nine black worshippers at a South Carolina church in 2015.
And Norwegian killer Anders Breivik – who massacred 77 people in 2011 – was also cited as an inspiration by Gendron.
The Google Document that contained Gendron’s manifesto remained online for several hours.
It was later taken down after Google said its contents had violated the web giant’s terms of service.
Screen grabs of its contents remain online.
A neighbor recalled him bringing home a human-sized Brontosaurus that he build for a school project. School records show that he was a good student and made high honors in his senior year, scoring higher than 92 percent in all his classes.
Facebook photos show that Gendron went on a few college tours and spent some time enrolled in Broome County Community College. A college spokeswoman told he Buffalo News that he was no longer enrolled.
‘They have a really nice family,’ neighbor Nancy Santucci said. ‘They seem like regular people. In a million years I never would think that anyone from this neighborhood would drive to Buffalo to carry out a racially motivated shooting.’
‘I’m just shocked,’ she said.