A teenaged gunman who allegedly murdered 10 people at a Buffalo supermarket planned the attack for months before he drove for three hours to carry out the vile ambush that was believed to be motivated by the white supremacist’s hated of black people.
Federal agents interviewed the parents of Payton Gendron, the teenager accused of shooting and killing 10 people at the supermarket, a law enforcement official told The Associated Press on Sunday.
Gendron, 18, of Conklin, NY, pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder following Saturday’s attack. He is being held without bail and faces life in prison. Gendron is due back in court on Thursday.
Gendron’s parents were cooperating with investigators, the official said. The official was not authorized to discuss details of the investigation into the Saturday afternoon shooting publicly and spoke to AP on condition of anonymity.
Police say the rambling text of a 180-page manifesto that Gendron posted before going on his rampage, included a plan of the attack which detailed driving several counties away to carry out the shooting at the Tops Friendly Market.
Gendron identified himself as a white supremacist in his manifesto, as he explained his fears that white people are being replaced by other races, police said.
‘The shooter traveled hours from outside this community to perpetrate this crime on the people of Buffalo, a day when people were enjoying the sunshine, enjoying family, enjoying friends,’ Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown said at a Saturday evening news conference.
‘People in a supermarket, shopping and bullets raining down on them. People’s lives being snuffed out in an instant for no reason.’
A preliminary investigation found Gendron had repeatedly visited sites espousing white supremacist ideologies and race-based conspiracy theories and extensively researched the 2019 mosque shootings in Christchurch, New Zealand, and the man who killed dozens at a summer camp in Norway in 2011, the official said.
It wasn’t immediately clear why Gendron had traveled about 200 miles from his Conklin, New York, to Buffalo and that particular grocery store, but investigators believe Gendron had specifically researched the demographics of the population around the Tops Friendly Markey and had been searching for communities with a high number of African American residents, the official said. The market is located in a predominantly Black neighborhood.
Police said Gendron shot, in total, 11 Black people and two white people Saturday in a rampage that the 18-year-old broadcast live before surrendering to authorities. Screenshots purporting to be from the Twitch broadcast appear to show a racial epithet scrawled on the rifle used in the attack, as well as the number 14, a likely reference to a white supremacist slogan.
Among the dead was security guard Aaron Salter – a retired Buffalo police officer – who fired multiple shots at Gendron, Buffalo Police Commissioner Joseph Gramaglia said Saturday. A bullet hit the gunman’s armor, but had no effect. Gendron then killed Salter, before hunting more victims.
Aaron Salter, a retired Buffalo police officer who was working as a store security guard, and shopper Ruth Whitfield, an 86-year-old grandmother, who is also the mother of former Buffalo fire commissioner Garnell Witfield.
Also killed was Ruth Whitfield, 86, the mother of retired Buffalo Fire Commissioner Garnell Whitfield.
Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown told churchgoers that he saw the former fire official at the shooting scene Saturday, looking for his mother.
‘My mother had just gone to see my father, as she does every day, in the nursing home and stopped at the Tops to buy just a few groceries. And nobody has heard from her,’ Whitfield told the mayor then. She was confirmed as a victim later in the day, Brown said.
Katherine Massey, who had gone to the store to pick up some groceries, also was killed, according to the Buffalo News.
Erie County Sheriff John Garcia expressly called the shooting a hate crime.
‘This was pure evil,’ Garcia said.
Twitch said in a statement that it ended Gendron’s transmission ‘less than two minutes after the violence started.’
The mass shooting further unsettled a nation wracked with racial tensions, gun violence and a spate of hate crimes. A day before, Dallas police had said they were investigating shootings in the city’s Koreatown as hate crimes. The Buffalo attack came just a month after a shooting on a Brooklyn subway wounded 10 and just over a year after 10 were killed in a shooting at a Colorado supermarket.
Gendron, confronted by police in the store’s vestibule following the shooting, put a rifle to his neck but was convinced to drop it. He was arraigned later Saturday on a murder charge, appearing before a judge in a paper gown.
A witness to the shooting recalls the the horrifying moments that unfolded when she saw the gunman began firing at people in the parking lot at the supermarket across from her home on Saturday.
Katherine Crofton, a retired firefighter, told the New York Post she heard the first shot and when she turned around and ‘saw him shoot the guy and the lady.’
Crofton said she then ‘immediately heard a shot,’ and realized ‘hero’ supermarket security guard Aaron Salter Jr. had been fatally shot because of the continued gunfire.
‘I knew Aaron was dead because he kept going,’ she said. She described him as a ‘good security guard,’ who ‘didn’t take no sh-t.’
Crofton said the rampage continued.
‘You hear him walk into the store shooting people, just, ‘pop, pop, pop,’ Crofton recalled. ‘He was in full combat gear – helmet, body armor, everything. He was loaded.’
When the gunman walked back out of the store, Crofton said she remembers the look on this face.
‘His face was just blank. There was no expression on his face,’ she said. ‘It was just blank.’
The Tops supermarket released a statement on Sunday morning, according to News9.
The statement reads, ‘The Tops family is heartbroken over the senseless violence that impacted associates and customers at our store on Jefferson Avenue. We are working quickly to make sure that all of our associates have access to counseling and support that they may need. Tops has been committed to this community and the city of Buffalo for decades and this tragedy will not change that commitment. We are working to find alternatives for our customers in this community while our store is closed and will provide updates in the near future.’
The victims killed in the shooting were remembered in a vigil service at True Bethel Baptist Church in Buffalo on Sunday morning.
As True Bethel’s Darius Pridgen spoke, ‘someone rushed in and caused a disturbance, appeared to yell ‘put down the gun,’ Jon Harris with Buffalo News tweeted. ‘They rushed him out and said, ‘not today.’ ‘Don’t hurt him, just get him the help he needs,’ Pridgen said
‘Before that, Pridgen said a man named Charles, who is singing today at True Bethel, was at the hospital yesterday after his