No Kuwaitis among casualties in Buffalo
KUWAIT CITY, May 15, (Agencies): No Kuwaitis were amongst the casualties of the Buffalo mass shooting, said a Kuwaiti diplomatic source late Saturday.
The Kuwaiti Consulate in New York affirmed in a statement obtained by KUNA that no Kuwaitis were amongst the casualties of the Buffalo mass shooting.
It urged Kuwaitis to avoid the place of the incident and obey the local authorities’ instructions.
The statement called on Kuwaiti citizens to contact the Consulate in New York: at the +19172426688 number in case of emergency.
The 18-year-old gunman who authorities say killed 10 people at a Buffalo supermarket had previously threatened a shooting at his high school and was sent for mental health treatment, a law enforcement official told The Associated Press.
Payton Gendron had appeared on the radar of police last year after he threatened to carry out a shooting at Susquehanna High School around the time of graduation, the official said. New York State Police said troopers were called to the Conklin school on June 8, 2021, for a report that a 17-year-old student had made threatening statements.
Police said the student was taken into custody under a state mental health law and taken to a hospital for an evaluation. The police statement did not give the student’s name.
The law enforcement official was not authorized to speak publicly on the investigation and did so on the condition of anonymity.
The white 18-year-old gunman had researched the local demographics while looking for places with a high concentration of Black residents, arriving there at least a day in advance to conduct reconnaissance, law enforcement officials said Sunday.
Authorities said Payton Gendron shot, in total, 11 Black people and two white people Saturday in a rampage motivated by racial hatred that he broadcast live.
Federal authorities were still working to confirm the authenticity of a 180-page manifesto that detailed the plot and identified Gendron by name as the gunman, a law enforcement official told The Associated Press. But the shooting — the latest act of mass violence in a country unsettled by racial tensions, gun violence and a recent spate of hate crimes — left local residents shattered.
It also prompted New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Buffalo native, to demand the technology industry take responsibility for its role in propagating hate speech.
Hochul told ABC that the heads of technology companies “need to be held accountable and assure all of us that they’re taking every step humanly possible to be able to monitor this information.”
“How these depraved ideas are fermenting on social media - it’s spreading like a virus now,” she said Sunday, adding that a lack of oversight could lead others to emulate the shooter.
Twitch said in a statement that it ended Gendron’s transmission “less than two minutes after the violence started.”
Screenshots purporting to be from the live 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.
“It’s just too much. I’m trying to bear witness but it’s just too much. You can’t even go to the damn store in peace,” Buffalo resident Yvonne Woodard told the AP. “It’s just crazy.”
A preliminary investigation found Gendron had repeatedly visited sites espousing white supremacist ideologies and racebased 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 law enforcement official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told AP.
It wasn’t immediately clear why Gendron had traveled about 200 miles (320 kilometers) from his Conklin, New York, home to Buffalo and that particular grocery store, but investigators believe Gendron had specifically researched the demographics of the population around the Tops Friendly Market, the official said. The market is located in a predominantly Black neighborhood.
In a Sunday interview with ABC, Buffalo Police Commissioner Joseph Gramaglia said that Gendron had been in town “at least the day before.”