Ten lives lost on a trip to the store like every other day
TThe grisly scene was broadcast online by the gunman, a video notable not just for the coldbloodedness of the executions, but how fast they unfolded.
hey were caregivers and protectors and helpers, running an errand or doing a favour or finishing out a shift, when their paths crossed with a young man driven by racism and hatred and inane theories. In a flash, the ordinariness of their day was broken at Tops Friendly Market in Buffalo, where in and around the supermarket’s aisles, a symbol of the mundane was transformed to a scene of mass murder. Carts lay abandoned. Bodies littered the tile floor. Police radios crackled with calls for help.
Investigators will try, for days to come, to piece together the massacre that killed 10 people, all Black and apparently hunted for the colour of their skin. Those who loved them are left with their memories of the lost, who suffered death amid the simple task of buying groceries.
“These people were just shopping,” said Steve Carlson, 29, mourning his 72-year-old neighbour Katherine Massey.
“They went to go get food to feed their families.”
One came from volunteering at a food bank. Another had been tending to her husband at his nursing home.
Most were in their 50s and beyond, and were destined for more, even if just the dinner they planned to make.
Shonnell Harris, a manager at the store, was stocking shelves when she heard the first of what she figured must have been more than 70 shots. She ran for the back door, stumbling a few times along the way. She wondered where her daughter, a grocery clerk, was, and went around to the front of the store.
She saw someone being shot, she said, and a man who looked like he was dressed for the Army.
“Like a nightmare,” Harris told The Buffalo News, shaken but grateful to have found her daughter safe.
The grisly scene was broadcast online by the gunman, a video notable not just for the coldbloodedness of the executions, but how fast they unfolded. In the deafening rat-a-tat-tat of gunfire, 10 voices were silenced, their stories left for others to recite.
Breaking the news to a father
Garnell Whitfield junior, whose 86-year-old mother Ruth Whitfield was killed in the attack, said she had come to Tops after her daily ritual of visiting her husband of 68 years in his nursing home. “That day was like every other day for my mom,” he said Monday as he pondered how to break the news to his father.
Heyward Patterson, a 67-year-old deacon at State Tabernacle Church of God in Christ, had just come from helping at his church’s soup kitchen and now was at Tops, volunteering in the community jitney service that shuttles people without a ride to and from the store.
Pastor Russell Bell of the Tabernacle Church said he believed Patterson had been loading someone’s groceries into his trunk when the shots took him down. “Anywhere he was, he was encouraging people to be the best that they could be,” Bell said.