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Post by Admin on May 15, 2022 17:02:48 GMT
After Mass Shooting, Buffalo Joins Charleston, Pittsburgh, El Paso In Ethnic Mass Attacks 24,741 views May 16, 2022 A white 18-year-old wearing body armor and carrying an assault rifle opened fire at a supermarket in an African American neighborhood. Ten people were killed, nine of them and three others were wounded, two of them Black. The mass shooting in Buffalo on Saturday afternoon marks another horrendous milestone in the confluence of white supremacist extremism and America's disastrously loose gun laws. It meant that a teenager filled with deep reservoirs of racial hatred and anti-semitism could pull up at a supermarket armed with an assault weapon and open fire on Saturday afternoon shoppers. He was wearing military gear, including a bullet proof vest and a combat helmet. Payton Gendron was just 18 years old. He had published online a 180-page manifesto containing far right conspiracy theories, echoing the same language as the 2019 New Zealand extremist who massacred innocents in Christchurch. He has already appeared in court, charged with first degree murder. The 18-year-old gunman had previously appeared on police radar after threatening a shooting at his high school and had been sent for mental health treatment, a police official told AP. At the time, New York State Police troopers had to be called to the Conklin school on June 8 of last year following reports that a 17-year-old student had made threatening statements.
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Post by Admin on May 15, 2022 17:42:23 GMT
BUFFALO, N.Y. (AP) — The white 18-year-old gunman who shot and killed 10 people at a Buffalo supermarket 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 race-based 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.
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Post by Admin on May 15, 2022 18:09:08 GMT
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.”
“It seems that he had come here to scope out the area, to do a little reconnaissance work on the area before he carried out his just evil, sickening act,” Gramaglia said.
The manifesto posted online and purportedly written by Gendron, outlined a racist ideology rooted in a belief that the United States should belong only to white people. All others, the document said, were “replacers” who should be eliminated by force or terror. The attack was intended to intimidate all non-white, non-Christian people and get them to leave the country, it said.
Gendron, confronted by police in the store’s vestibule, put a rifle to his neck but was convinced to drop it. He was arraigned later Saturday on a murder charge, appearing before a judge in a paper gown.
Federal agents interviewed Gendron’s parents and served multiple search warrants, the law enforcement official told the AP on Sunday. Gendron’s parents were cooperating with investigators, the official said. The official was not authorized to discuss details of the investigation publicly.
Among the dead was security guard Aaron Salter — a retired Buffalo police officer — who fired multiple shots at Gendron, Gramaglia said Saturday. A bullet hit the gunman’s armor, but had no effect. Gendron then killed Salter, before hunting more victims.
“He cared about the community. He looked after the store,” Yvette Mack, who had shopped at Tops earlier Saturday, said of Salter. “He did a good job you know. He was very nice and respectable.”
Also killed was Ruth Whitfield, 86, the mother of retired Buffalo Fire Commissioner Garnell Whitfield.
Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown told churchgoers that he saw the former fire official at the shooting scene Saturday, looking for his mother.
“My mother had just gone to see my father, as she does every day, in the nursing home and stopped at the Tops to buy just a few groceries. And nobody has heard from her,” Whitfield told the mayor then. She was confirmed as a victim later in the day, Brown said.
Katherine Massey, who had gone to the store to pick up some groceries, also was killed, according to the Buffalo News. The names of the rest of the victims hadn’t been released.
“We pray for their families. But after we pray — after we get up off of our knees — we’ve got to demand change. We’ve got to demand justice,” state Attorney General Letitia James said an emotional church service in Buffalo on Sunday morning. “This was domestic terrorism, plain and simple.”
The Buffalo attack came just a month after a shooting on a Brooklyn subway wounded 10 and just over a year after 10 were killed in a shooting at a Colorado supermarket.
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Associated Press reporter Robert Bumsted contributed reporting from Buffalo, New York. Balsamo reported from Washington.
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Post by Admin on May 15, 2022 20:07:48 GMT
Alleged Buffalo shooter may have planned attack months ago: authorities | ABC7 120,224 views May 16, 2022 Authorities say the suspect who fatally shot 10 people and injured three others at a Buffalo supermarket Saturday traveled from another New York county hours away, and that the attack may have been planned months beforehand. READ MORE: abc7.com/11852258
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Post by Admin on May 16, 2022 2:53:26 GMT
Here's how you can help the community of Buffalo City
175,090 views May 16, 2022 Buffalo City Council President Darius Pridgen calls on the nation to grieve with the City of Buffalo following its worst mass shooting, on 'Sunday Night in America.'
The alleged gunman in the Buffalo shooting, which authorities are investigating as a racially motivated attack, had threatened a shooting at his high school in June, police said. Some of the identities of the victims are also emerging.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul says $2.8 million in federal and state funding will go toward helping the victims of a gunman's racist attack at a Buffalo, N.Y., supermarket.
Funds can be used to cover funeral and burial expenses of up to $6,000, medical expenses and counseling. A state agency can also assist with the loss of wages and the loss of support, according to the governor's office.
The governor also noted that the supermarket where the shooting occurred was in a "food desert" and was the only supermarket within walking distance for residents in the area. Hochul says Uber and Lyft will provide free rides worth up to $20 for residents to reach two other grocery stores.
"The past 24 hours have been traumatizing for New Yorkers, and my administration will spare no effort to ensure the victims of this act of terrorism by a white supremacist are receiving all the resources and support they need," she said in a statement.
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