More funerals for Buffalo victims in a week of farewells

‘It’s like Groundhog Day,’ says the son of a victim

BUFFALO, N.Y. — A mother and sister known for baking decadent pastries. A restaurant worker buying his 3-yearold’s birthday cake. A father and diehard Buffalo Bills fan who worked as a school bus aide.

Those three victims of the racist attack on a Buffalo supermarket were laid to rest Friday during a week filled with goodbyes for family and friends.

Geraldine Talley, 62, of Buffalo; Andre Mackniel, 53, of Auburn; and Margus Morrison, 52, of Buffalo, were among the 10 people killed and three wounded when a white gunman opened fire on shoppers and employees at a Tops Friendly Market on May 14. Authorities said he chose the grocery store because it’s in a predominantly Black neighborhood.

“We cannot sit here today and cry for Geraldine, and not make sure justice is done for Geraldine,” the Rev. Al Sharpton, a prominent civil rights activist, told mourners at Talley’s service at Mount Aaron Missionary Baptist Church.

He and Talley’s son, Mark Talley, spoke out against a lack of investment in the east side neighborhood that, with just one supermarket, gave someone intent on killing Black people an easy target.

And they condemned the ready access to the kind of semiautomatic rifles used by the 18-year-old alleged gunman in Buffalo, and then by the 18-year-old accused of killing 19 students and two teachers inside an Uvalde, Texas, elementary school 10 days later.

Soon after his mother’s death, Mark Talley said, he predicted that such attacks would continue. “It’s like Groundhog Day. We’ve seen this over and over again,” he said at the time.

“There’s no point … for you to have an AR-15 kept underneath your bed at home,” Talley said at his mother’s funeral. “No point for you to need an AR-15 to protect your family.”

Vice President Kamala Harris is expected Saturday to attend the last of the funerals for the supermarket victims as 86-year-old Ruth Whitfield is memorialized. President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden traveled to Buffalo to visit with families and lay flowers at a memorial on May 17.

Friends and family of Talley said she was an expert baker who treated them to apple crisp, cakes and pastries. She was with her fiancé, Gregory Allen, at Tops when the shooting started. Allen was in a different aisle and made it to safety.