10 killed in ‘hate crime’
Pure evil: Teen livestreamed shooting in US supermarket
AThis is the worst nightmare that any community can face, and we are hurting and we are seething right now. Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown
white 18-year-old wearing military gear and livestreaming with a helmet camera opened fire with a rifle at a supermarket in Buffalo, killing 10 people and wounding three others yesterday in what authorities described as “racially motivated, violent extremism”.
Police said he shot 11 black and two white victims before surrendering to authorities in a rampage he broadcast live on the streaming platform Twitch.
Later, he appeared before a judge in a paper medical gown and was arraigned on a murder charge.
“It is my sincere hope that this individual, this white supremacist who just perpetrated a hate crime on an innocent community, will spend the rest of his days behind bars. And heaven help him in the next world as well,” said Governor Kathy Hochul, speaking near the scene of the attack.
The massacre sent shockwaves through an unsettled nation gripped with racial tensions, gun violence and a spate of hate crimes. In the day prior to the shooting, Dallas police said they were investigating a series of shootings in Koreatown as hate crimes. The Buffalo attack came just one month after another mass shooting on a Brooklyn subway train wounded 10 people.
The suspected gunman in yesterday’s attack on Tops Friendly Market was identified as Payton Gendron, of Conklin, New York, about 320km southeast of Buffalo.
It wasn’t immediately clear why Gendron had travelled to Buffalo and that particular grocery store.
The New York Times reported that the attack appeared to have been inspired by earlier massacres that were motivated by racial hatred, including the Christchurch mosque shooting and another at a Walmart in Texas, both in 2019.
A clip apparently from his Twitch feed, posted on social media, showed Gendron arriving at the supermarket in his car.
The gunman shot four people outside the store, three fatally, said Buffalo Police Commissioner Joseph Gramaglia. Inside the store, a security guard who was a retired Buffalo police officer fired multiple shots, but a bullet that hit the gunman’s bulletproof vest had no effect, Gramaglia added.
The gunman then killed the guard, the commissioner said, then stalked through the store shooting other victims.
“This is the worst nightmare that any community can face, and we are hurting and we are seething right now,” Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown said at the news conference. “The depth of pain that families are feeling and that all of us are feeling right now cannot even be explained.”
Police entered the store and confronted the gunman in the vestibule. “At that point the suspect put the gun to his own neck,” Gramaglia said.
Two officers talked him into dropping the gun, the commissioner said.
Twitch said in a statement that it ended Gendron’s transmission “less than two minutes after the violence started”.
At the earlier news briefing, Erie County Sheriff John Garcia called the shooting a hate crime.
“This was pure evil. It was (a) straight up racially motivated hate crime from somebody outside of our community, outside of the City of Good Neighbors . . . coming into our community and trying to inflict that evil upon us,” Garcia said.
Witnesses Braedyn Kephart and Shane Hill, both 20, pulled into the parking lot just as the shooter was exiting. They described a white male in his late teens or early twenties sporting full camo, a black helmet and a rifle.
“He was standing there with the gun to his chin. We were like what the heck is going on? Why does this kid have a gun to his face?” Kephart said. He dropped to his knees. “He ripped off his helmet, dropped his gun, and was tackled by the police.”
Officials said the rifle Gendron used in the attack was purchased legally, but that the magazines he used for ammunition were not allowed to be sold in New York.
President Joe Biden in a statement said he and the First Lady were praying for the victims and their families.
“We still need to learn more about the motivation for today’s shooting as law enforcement does its work, but we don’t need anything else to state a clear moral truth: A racially motivated hate crime is abhorrent to the very fabric of this nation,” he said.
“Any act of domestic terrorism, including an act perpetrated in the name of a repugnant white nationalist ideology, is antithetical to everything we stand for in America.”
Tops Friendly Markets released a statement saying, “We are shocked and deeply saddened by this senseless act of violence and our thoughts and prayers are with the victims and their families.”