FAMILIES MOURN N.Y. SHOOTING VICTIMS
Amy Pilc never socialized with Heyward Patterson, a jitney driver at the grocery store where she often shopped.
Pilc would observe Patterson, 67, assist older customers with their shopping bags, seeming to take deep delight in such a small act. Some days, she walked to the market several times, spotting his grin on each trip.
His spirit made her think, she said, about what good she could do in her own life.
Not until Patterson was killed in a racist massacre at the grocery store last week did Pilc learn that, like so many others in the Masten Park neighborhood on Buffalo’s East Side, she had a small personal connection to him: He was her goddaughter’s great-uncle.
“That’s why I came,” Pilc, 46, said outside Patterson’s funeral at Lincoln Memorial United Methodist Church on Friday morning. “It’s such a small world here, and he didn’t deserve it. None of them deserved it.”
The service Friday was the first for 10 Black people who came to the Jefferson Avenue supermarket, Tops, on their own personal, quotidian missions — a work shift, a dinner supply run, a trip to buy a birthday cake for a 3-year-old son — but whose lives ended together.
Patterson’s family asked that reporters not enter the service. But hundreds of visitors from across New York state traveled to Buffalo on Friday to mourn the death of their friend, a deacon at State Tabernacle Church of God whose greetings at the front entrance brightened worshippers’ days.
Deacon Patterson, as he was known, would take a few dollars to provide rides from the Tops in Masten Park, a poorer section where many residents lack cars and rely on tightknit circles of neighbors for help. Nearly every day, he loaded his Ford Fusion with shopping bags, drove customers home and then repeated the trip, helping the next neighbor in need.
“He was a bright star in the midst of turmoil,” said Clyde Haslam, 66, who attended kindergarten with Patterson and had been his friend ever since.
A wake was also scheduled Friday afternoon for Roberta Drury, at 32 the youngest of the people slain at the market. Drury’s funeral service will be held today at Assumption Church in Syracuse. Her family has also requested that the service be closed to the press.
Funerals for five other Buffalo shooting victims were scheduled throughout next week.