A heavily armed 18-year-old white man opened fire on a supermarket in a predominantly black part of Buffalo, killing 10 people and wounding three others, authorities said in a racist attack that turned Sunny Saturday into one of the darkest days in the city’s history.
The suspect was identified in court as Payton S. Gendron of Conklin, New York. He pleaded not guilty Saturday night to first-degree murder, a charge that could result in life in prison without parole.
Mr Hendron was armed with an assault weapon and wore a bulletproof vest, police said, and had a video camera attached to his helmet that broadcasted the shooting live online.
The attack appears to have been inspired by earlier massacres motivated by racial hatred, including a shooting at a mosque in New Zealand and another at Walmart in Texas, both in 2019.
A law enforcement official said investigators were reviewing a manifesto believed to have been published online by Mr Gendron. It was filled with racist, anti-immigrant views, claiming that white Americans were at risk of being replaced by people of color, an ideology known as the “Great Replacement” theory. In videos and images of the massacre, which appear to have been captured by a camera attached to his helmet, anti-black racial slander can be seen on the barrel of his weapon.
Eleven of those shot were black and two were white, authorities said.
“It was a purely racially motivated hate crime,” Erie County Sheriff John Garcia told a news conference Saturday night.
The massacre began around 2:30 p.m., authorities said when Mr. Hendron, who did not live in Buffalo and drove several hours from Conklin, a town south of Binghamton, got out of his car wearing tactical gear. and bulletproof vests and carrying assault weapons.
He shot dead four people in the parking lot, Buffalo Police Commissioner Joseph A. Gramagia told a news conference, three of them deadly. As he entered the store and continued firing, he met a security guard, a retired Buffalo police officer, who returned fire. But Mr. Hendron wore heavy metal coatings; he killed the guard and continued on to the store, shooting at shoppers and employees.
When Buffalo police arrived and confronted Mr Gendron, he put a gun to his neck, but two patrols persuaded him to drop his weapon and surrender, Mr Gramaglia said.
Buffalo Attorney General Trini E. Ross said her office would investigate the killings as hate crimes. Stephen Belongia, the special agent in charge of the FBI’s field office in Buffalo, said the shooting was “a case of racially motivated violent extremism”.
Buffalo Mayor Byron W. Brown said he and his family periodically shop at the Tops Friendly Markets store. “Some of the victims of this shooter’s attack are people we all know here,” he said, surrounded by the city’s political and law enforcement leaders.
The attack took place in a neighborhood known as Masten Park in eastern Buffalo. Dominic Calhoun, who lives near the Tops supermarket, said she stopped in his parking lot when the shooting happened.
She said she saw people running and shouting, so she parked across the street. She was with her two daughters, ages 8 and 9, and the three had planned to buy ice cream.
“It could literally be me,” she said of the people who were killed.
At the crime scene, Barbara Massie Maps waited anxiously in front of the police news feed for her 72-year-old sister, whom she suspected was in the supermarket when the shooting took place. “I will be here until I see my sister,” she said.
Officials said the shooter’s camera was used to broadcast the attack live on Twitch, an Amazon-owned live broadcast site popular with gamers. Twitch said he pulled the channel offline.
“The user has been suspended from our service indefinitely and we take all appropriate action, including monitoring all accounts that rebroadcast this content,” a Twitch spokesman said.
Screenshots of the show have been circulating online, including some that appear to show the shooter holding a gun and standing over a body in a grocery store.
Other social media posts showed what was said to be a list of instructions the shooter had made for himself – a to-do list including “continuing to write a manifesto” and “testing the live feature before the actual attack” – on the Discord messaging platform. The Discord username matches the Twitch channel name.
Federal authorities are investigating a statement to the effect that the shooter posted online, according to a senior federal law enforcement official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to disclose details of the investigation.
The document, which is being circulated on the 4chan online bulletin board, compares the shooter’s plan to other mass shootings motivated by fanaticism and promotes the “great swap” theory.
He wrote that he would use GoPro Hero 7 Black to “broadcast live the attack on Twitch” he chose so that “all people on the Internet can watch and record.” He noted that the shooting at a Jewish synagogue in Halle, Germany, in 2019 was also broadcast live on Twitch.
He then described in more than a dozen pages what tactical equipment he recommended for such attacks, including knives, vests and medical equipment. He said “conservatism is dead” and that advocating for progressives for equality was wrong because, he said, the average black man had a lower IQ than a white man.
The 10 people killed in Buffalo represent the largest number of deaths in mass shootings this year, according to the Arms Violence Archive, which tracks them. The highest death toll this year was six in a shooting in downtown Sacramento on April 3rd. Six people were also killed in a shooting in Corsica, Texas, on February 5, and the same number were killed in a shooting in Milwaukee on January 23, according to the site.
Firearms deaths reached the highest number ever recorded in the United States in 2020, the first year of the pandemic, rising 35 percent, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Tuesday.
“This is a historic increase, with the percentage reaching its highest level in more than 25 years,” said Dr. Debra E. Huri, acting Deputy Director General of the CDC and Director of the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control. news briefing this week.
Dan Higgins, Luke Hamill, Glenn Thrash, Adam Goldman, Alexandra E. Petri, Ashley Southhall, Vimal Patel and Eduardo Medina contributed to the report. Jack Beg contributed to the research.
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