LOVED ONES LOST TO SICK HATE
Grieving kin rage: 'Let killer suffer'
A 65-year-old victim of the Buffalo massacre went to the store with her sister to get strawberries for shortcakes — and died when she couldn’t run as fast as her sibling, who hid in a freezer.
The 86-year-old mom of the city’s former fire commissioner had just left her elderly, ailing husband at a nursing home and was stopping by the Tops Friendly Market to pick up groceries when she was killed.
The grieving mother of a 32-yearold victim said she found out her daughter died from seeing video of her being shot on social media.
And the head of a local food pantry also was among the 10 people allegedly slain by Payton Gendron, 18 — who was just like the young men she would have taught, her family said.
“You don’t expect this when your mother goes grocery shopping,” said Pamela Pritchett, 55, whose mom, Pearl Young, 77, had worked as a substitute teacher and helped feed needy locals at the city’s Central Park neighborhood before she was killed.
Ruth Whitfield, the mom of former Buffalo Fire Commissioner Garnell Whitfield, was shopping at the Tops when she was allegedly gunned down by the alleged white
supremacist, too. Eleven of his victims were black and two were white.
Garnell told The Post on Sunday that his father doesn’t know about Ruth’s death yet.
She was at the nursing home “every day taking care of my dad, shaving him, cutting his nails, cleaning his ears, cutting his hair, washing him, bathing him . . . making sure his room was decorated for holidays,’’ Garnell Whitfield said.
“Yesterday she was leaving the nursing home, stopped at the store around the corner when this happened,” he said, his voice breaking.
Katherine Massey was also killed. Her sister, Barbara Mapps, told The
Post on Sunday that she’s so angry she wants to choke Gendron.
“I got pissed today and called the coroner . . . [The killer] shot them all in the face,’’ Mapps said. “We have to close [Katherine’s] coffin . . . One of the nicest people in the world.
“I don’t want him dead,’’ she said of the suspected killer. “Please Jesus, don’t let him die. Let him suffer.
“He should be with every black, Jew, Spanish person on the [cell] block. He should have no white folks, just black, Jews, Spanish. Chocolate milk, chocolate milk, chocolate milk — every type of chocolate,’’ Mapps, 64, said.
Massey, 72, was also a local activist, including for civil rights, said
former Erie County Legislator Betty Jean Grant to The Buffalo News.
‘Could never forgive him’
Celestine Chaney was also killed. “I am so heartbroken man my grandma was murdered basically for the color of her skin in 2022,” her granddaughter, who goes by Kay Savyy on Facebook, wrote Saturday, adding, “I could and would never forgive that man.”
Chaney’s son Wayne Jones told The New York Times his mother was shopping with her sister when shots rang out. Jones said her sister was able to escape to the freezer, “but my mom cannot really walk like she used to.”
Another victim, Heyward Patterson, 68, was a jitney driver who’d pick up shoppers, according to The Buffalo News. He was remembered by family and friends as a man of the community who was active in his church.
The mother of Roberta Drury, Dezzelyn McDuffie, told The Buffalo News she found out her daughter had died from seeing video of her being shot on social media. “She was just coming out of Tops,” McDuffie said.
Supermarket security guard Aaron Salter Jr., a 55-year-old former Buffalo cop, was shot dead exchanging gunfire with the shooter. “He’s a hero,” his son Aaron Salter III said.
svago@nypost.com