BUFFALO SUSPECT SPENT MONTHS DETAILING PLAN
FBI director describes shooting as ‘an act of racially motivated violent extremism’
Payton Gendron, the 18year-old accused of killing 10 people at a supermarket in Buffalo on Saturday, recorded increasingly detailed plans to murder dozens of Black people in statements posted online over the past six months, according to extensive message logs by a writer who identified himself as Gendron.
A review of more than 600 pages of logs by The Washington Post found that Gendron resolved in December to kill those he slurred as “replacers,” and decided in February to target Buffalo’s Tops store based on its local African American population. In March, he performed a reconnaissance-style trip to monitor the store’s security and map out its aisles, the logs show. When a store guard confronted him about why he had repeatedly entered that day, Gendron made excuses and fled in what he described as “a close call,” the logs said.
Having identified the supermarket as “attack area 1,” Gendron detailed two additional Buffalo locations as areas at which to “shoot all blacks,” according to the logs, which showed that he charted routes to each location, worked out the times needed for each shootout and assessed that more than three dozen people in all could be fatally shot.
Police confirmed on Monday that they suspected Gendron had intended to attack multiple locations. Also on Monday, FBI Director Christopher Wray, in a call with various law enforcement officials and community leaders, said, “I want to be clear, for my part, from everything we know, this was a targeted attack, a hate crime and an act of racially motivated violent extremism.”
Gendron, from Conklin, N.Y., has pleaded not guilty to firstdegree murder in relation to the
attack on Saturday. Three other people were also injured before Gendron was arrested at the grocery store. Police have said they are investigating the shootings, which were livestreamed, as a racially-motivated hate crime. In a separate 180-page document published two days before Saturday’s shooting, Gendron cited a racist conspiracy that nonWhites were brought to the United States to replace White people for political purposes.
The 672-page compilation of message logs was published during the weeks before the attack in Buffalo. The logs were written by an author who identified himself as Gendron, featured a screen name that Gendron used on other platforms, contained images of Gendron’s face in selfies and referenced events in his personal life, such as a speeding ticket, which The Washington Post verified.
The logs were displayed as a collected archive of Gendron’s posts since November on Discord, an online messaging platform where users may create invite-only chat groups. Original messages posted to Discord by Gendron’s account were not publicly available and the company did not respond to questions on Monday about how many people had been able to see his posts before the shooting.
In a previous statement regarding other Discord messages apparently posted by Gendron, the company said: “We extend our deepest sympathies to the victims and their families, and we will do everything we can to assist law enforcement in the investigation.”
In addition to laying out mounting plans for a mass shooting, the logs amount to a wide-ranging journal of a troubled 18-year-old, who described killing and mutilating a cat and being taken to a medical facility for psychiatric evaluation after he stated in a high school class that he planned to commit “murder/ suicide.”
The June 2021 incident was referred to New York State Police, according to a person familiar with the school’s handling of it, who spoke anonymously to discuss confidential matters involving a student. Gendron wrote in the message logs that the matter was dropped when he said he had been joking to get out of class, an account confirmed by the person familiar with the school’s handling of it.
“That is the reason I believe I am still able to purchase guns,” Gendron wrote. “It was not a joke, I wrote that down because that’s what I was planning to do.”
In mid-November, according to the logs, Gendron posted to Discord a copy of a document published by Brenton Tarrant, an avowed racist who killed 51 Muslims in attacks on two mosques in New Zealand in 2019. Separately, Gendron claimed authorship of an anonymous Nov. 9 post on the 4chan message board, a site notorious for extremist discussion, which said “a brenton tarrant event will happen again soon.”
After he posted claims about “inferior” races, the logs show, Gendron wrote on Dec. 5 that he had decided it was time to stop simply posting on the Internet and to act. “I will carry out an attack against the replacers, and will even livestream the attack,” he wrote.
Around that time, according to the logs, he bought a Mossberg 500 shotgun. He already owned a hunting rifle that he had received as a Christmas present from his father when he was 16, according to the message logs. Efforts to reach Gendron’s parents were unsuccessful.
Gendron recounted making frequent trips to gun stores in the message logs, recording at least 15 visits across six stores between Dec. 8 and Jan. 19. He hid weapons and ammunition in his bedroom at his parents’ home, according to the logs, and feared at one point that his mother might discover the stockpile, jeopardizing his plans.
According to the logs and the store’s owner, Gendron bought a Bushmaster XM-15 rifle — the type of gun that was allegedly used in Buffalo on Saturday — from Vintage Firearms in Endicott, N.Y., in January.
The message logs detailed Gendron’s purchases of other equipment he planned to use in an attack, including a military-style helmet from eBay and body armor plates bought online from RMA Armament of Centerville, Iowa. Confirming Gendron’s purchase, RMA chief executive Blake Waldrop said in a statement the firm was “devastated by this tragedy” and was praying for the families of the victims in Buffalo.
Having considered attacking in other cities including Rochester, Gendron wrote online on Feb. 17 that he had a “new plan”: Buffalo, which had a higher proportion of Black residents. “TOPS Friendly Markets,” he wrote, “damn that is looking good.”
The logs detailed a March 8 trip to the supermarket in which Gendron allegedly surveilled the movements of the store’s security guards and made observations of the weapons they carried. Detailed sketches of the store’s floorplan were included in the logs, together with multiple photographs, including a parking spot “for the attack.”
The written account said that its author was stopped and ticketed for driving at 64 miles per hour in a 40-mph section of State Highway 36 en route to Buffalo on March 8. The Post obtained a copy of a speeding ticket issued to Gendron by a New York state trooper that day that matches those details.
Inside the supermarket, Gendron noted, there were “many blacks” at the cashiers’ area and in other locations. In all, 53 Black people and six White people were inside the store, he wrote, along with two Black security guards carrying what he said were Glock pistols.
Gendron recounted being confronted by one of the guards after having entered the store three times that day.
“I’ve seen you go in and out . . . What are you doing?” the guard asked him, according to the logs. Gendron replied that he was “collecting consensus data” before making excuses and heading for his car, he wrote, adding: “In hindsight that was a close call.” Authorities said a security guard fired at the shooter during Saturday’s attack in Buffalo, but the suspect was protected by body armor and allegedly returned fire, killing the guard.
Buffalo Police Commissioner Joseph Gramaglia said during a news conference on Monday that investigators had learned that the suspect was in the Buffalo area in early March.
At the end of March, Gendron mused about other areas he might attack such as majority-Black churches or schools. “I would consider breaking into a Buffalo elementary school but those places are locked up tight plus I get a strange feeling when thinking avout [sic] massacreing [sic] children,” he wrote.
At times, Gendron flaunted the apparent lack of interest in him by law enforcement. “[H]mm I wonder why the FBI isn’t tackling me right now? probably because they want it to happen,” he wrote in an April 28 post that included images of a shotgun and hunting rifle. An FBI spokesperson said that the bureau was not aware of Gendron before the shooting in Buffalo.