Police: Gunman planned 2nd attack
Suspect in Buffalo talked of another shooting had he fled
BUFFALO, N.Y. — The white gunman accused of massacring 10 Black people in a racist rampage at a Buffalo supermarket planned to keep killing if he had escaped the scene, the police commissioner said Monday, as the possibility of federal hate crime or domestic terror charges loomed.
The gunman, who had crossed the state to target people at the Tops Friendly Market, had talked about shooting up another store as well, Buffalo Police Commissioner Joseph Gramaglia told CNN.
“He was going to get in his car and continue to drive down Jefferson Avenue and continue doing the same thing,” the commissioner said.
The commissioner’s account was similar to portions of a racist 180-page document, purportedly written by Payton Gendron, that said the assault was intended to terrorize all nonwhite, non-christian people and get them to leave the country. Federal authorities were working to confirm the document’s authenticity.
Investigators also said Monday the suspect taunted law enforcement online last month and
visited Buffalo back in March.
Payton Gendron, 18, began posting threads on the social media platform Discord about body armor and guns, and in April made provocative remarks about federal law enforcement, the FBI agent in charge for Buffalo, Stephen Belongia, said.
Gendron, 18, traveled 200 miles from his home in Conklin, New York, police said. Authorities said he wielded an Ar-15-style rifle, wore body armor and used a helmet camera to livestream the attack on the internet.
Federal prosecutors said they are contemplating federal hate crime charges.
Meanwhile, Rep. Liz Cheney, R-wyo., a former member of GOP leadership in the House, on Monday called out her party’s leaders for enabling the spread of white nationalism that infused the gunman’s purported manifesto.
“The House GOP leadership has enabled white nationalism, white supremacy, and antisemitism,” Cheney wrote on Twitter. “History has taught us that what begins with words ends in far worse. @GOP leaders must renounce and reject these views and those who hold them.”
Her statement came as Republicans in Congress angrily pushed back against accusations that their language and actions perpetuated the racism and xenophobia that were apparently behind the massacre.
Former Buffalo Fire Commissioner Garnell Whitfield, who lost his 86-yearold mother, Ruth Whitfield, in the shooting, asked how the country could allow its history of racist killings to repeat itself.
“We’re not just hurting. We’re angry. We’re mad. This shouldn’t have happened. We do our best to be good citizens, to be good people. We believe in God. We trust Him. We treat people with decency, and we love even our enemies,” Whitfield said at a news conference.
“And you expect us to keep doing this over and over and over again — over again, forgive and forget,” he continued. “While people we elect and trust in offices around this country do their best not to protect us, not to consider us equal.”
Whitfield’s mother was killed after making her daily visit to her husband in a nursing home.
“How do we tell him that she’s gone? Much less that she’s gone at the hands of a white supremacist? Of a terrorist? An evil person who is allowed to live among us?” Whitfield said.
The victims also included a man buying a cake for his grandson; a church deacon helping people get home with their groceries; and a supermarket security guard.
Law enforcement officials said Sunday that New York State Police troopers had been called to Gendron’s high school last June for a report that the then-17-year-old had made threatening statements. The threat was “general” in nature and not related to race, Gramaglia said.
Gendron had threatened to carry out a shooting at Susquehanna Valley High in Conklin around graduation, according to a law enforcement official who was not authorized to discuss the investigation publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.
Gramaglia said Gendron had no further contact with law enforcement after a mental health evaluation that put him in a hospital for a day and a half.
It was unclear whether officials could have invoked New York’s “red flag” regulation, which lets law enforcement, school officials and families ask a court to order the seizure of guns from people considered dangerous. Authorities would not say when Gendron acquired the weapons. An evaluation alone would not trigger the prohibition.
President Joe Biden, who planned a visit Tuesday to Buffalo, paid tribute to one of the victims, security guard and retired police officer Aaron Salter, who fired at the attacker, striking his armor-plated vest at least once before being shot and killed. Biden said Salter “gave his life trying to save others.”
Authorities said that in addition to the 10 Black people killed, three people were wounded: one Black, two white.