BUFFALO, N.Y. (AP) — The white gunman accused of massacring 10 Black people at a Buffalo supermarket wrote as far back as November about staging a livestreamed attack on African Americans, practiced shooting from his car and traveled hours from his home in March to scout out the store, according to detailed diary entries he appears to have posted online.
The author of the diary posted hand-drawn maps of the grocery store along with tallies of the number of Black people he counted there, and recounted how a Black security guard at the supermarket confronted him that day to ask what he was up to. A Black security guard was among the dead in Saturday’s shooting rampage.
The diary taken from the chat platform Discord came to light two days after 18-year-old Payton Gendron allegedly opened fire with an AR-15-style rifle at the Tops Friendly Market. He was wearing body armor and used a helmet camera to livestream the bloodbath on the internet, authorities said.
He surrendered inside the supermarket and was arraigned on a murder charge over the weekend. He pleaded not guilty and was jailed under a suicide watch. Federal authorities are contemplating bringing hate crime charges.
Copies of the online materials were shared with The Associated Press by Marc-André Argentino, a research fellow at the London-based International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence.
A transcript of the diary entries was apparently posted publicly sometime ahead of the attack. It was not clear how many people might have seen the entries. Experts said it was possible but unlikely the diary could have been altered by someone other than the author.
The FBI’s top agent in Buffalo, Stephen Belongia, indicated on a call with other officials Monday that investigators are looking at Gendron’s Discord activity, citing posts last summer about body armor and guns and others last month in which he taunted federal authorities. Belongia gave no give details in the call, which the AP obtained.
But in an April 17 post apparently by Gendron, he exhorted readers to kill agents from the FBI and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
Messages seeking comment were left with Gendron’s lawyers. No one answered the door at his family’s home.
The violence spread grief and anger in Buffalo and beyond.
Former Buffalo Fire Commissioner Garnell Whitfield Jr., who lost his 86-year-old 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,” Whitfield said at a news conference with civil rights attorney Ben Crump and others. “We treat people with decency, and we love even our enemies.”
“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.”
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.
The online diary details a March 8 reconnaissance visit the writer made to Buffalo, about 200 miles (320 kilometers) from Gendron’s home in Conklin, New York.
Buffalo Police Commissioner Joseph Gramaglia said at a news conference that there was information indicating Gendron was in Buffalo in March, but Gramaglia declined to say more.
The commissioner said numerous investigators are working on obtaining and reviewing Gendron’s online postings.
“There’s a lot of social that’s being looked at, or that’s being verified, captured,” Gramaglia said. “Some of that takes warrants that have to be served on various social media platforms.”
The author of the diary talked about checking out targets including the Tops Friendly Market and said a security guard asked what he was doing after his second visit of the day. He gave an excuse about collecting data and soon left — “a close call,” he wrote.
A 180-page document purportedly written by Gendron said the attack was intended to terrorize all nonwhite, non-Christian people and get them to leave the country. Federal authorities said they are working to confirm the document’s authenticity.
Gendron had briefly been on authorities’ radar last spring, when state police were called to his high school for a report that the then-17-year-old had made threatening statements.
Belongia, the FBI agent, said Gendron had responded to a question about future plans by saying that he wanted to commit a murder-suicide.
A December Discord post that Gendron apparently made said he had given that answer to a question about retirement in an economics class and ended up spending “one of the worst nights of my life” in a hospital.
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. On the call with Belongia, Gramaglia said state police “did everything within the confines of the law” at that time.
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.
Federal law bars people from owning guns if a judge has determined they have a “mental defect” or they have been forced into a mental institution. An evaluation alone would not trigger the prohibition.
At the White House, President Joe Biden, who planned a visit Tuesday to Buffalo, paid tribute to the slain security guard, retired police officer Aaron Salter.
Salter fired repeatedly 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.
Zeneta Everhart said her son, supermarket employee Zaire Goodman, was helping a shopper outside when he saw a man get out of a car in military gear and point a gun at him. Then a bullet hit Goodman in the neck.
“Mom! Mom, get here now, get here now! I got shot!” he told his mother by phone. Goodman, 20, was out of the hospital and doing well Monday, his mother said.
In livestreamed video of the attack circulating online, the gunman trained his weapon on a white person cowering behind a checkout counter, but said, “Sorry!” and didn’t shoot. Screenshots purporting to be from the broadcast appear to show a racial slur against Black people scrawled on his rifle.
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This story has been corrected to show that Whitfield, not his father, is a former Buffalo fire commissioner.
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Associated Press reporters Robert Bumsted in Buffalo; Michael Hill in Conklin; Dave Collins in Hartford, Connecticut; and Karen Matthews, Aaron Morrison and Jennifer Peltz in New York contributed to this report. Tucker and Balsamo reported from Washington, and Sisak from New York.
Buffalo shooting latest example of targeted racial violence
Black people going about their daily lives — then dying in a hail of bullets fired by a white man who targeted them because of their skin color.
Substitute a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, with a church in South Carolina, and Malcolm Graham knows the pain and grief the families of those killed Saturday are feeling. He knows their dismay that racial bigotry has torn apart the fabric of their families.
“America’s Achilles’ heel continues to be … racism,” said Graham, whose sister, Cynthia Graham-Hurd, was among nine parishioners fatally shot by avowed white supremacist Dylann Roof in 2015 during Bible study in Charleston.
“As a country, we need to acknowledge that it exists,” Graham said. “There’s a lack of acknowledgment that these problems are persistent, are embedded into systems and cost lives.”
For many Black Americans, the Buffalo shooting has stirred up the same feelings they faced after Charleston and other attacks: the fear, the vulnerability, the worry that nothing will be done politically or otherwise to prevent the next act of targeted racial violence.
Law enforcement officials said suspected gunman Payton Gendron, 18, drove 200 miles from his hometown of Conklin, New York, to Buffalo after searching out and specifically targeting a predominantly Black neighborhood.
He shot 11 Black people and two white people at the grocery store, authorities said. Ten people died, all of them Black.
A 180-page document, purportedly written by Gendron, gives plans for the attack and makes references to other racist shootings and to Roof. The document also outlines a racist ideology rooted in a belief that the U.S. 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.
The idea that those killed at the Tops Friendly Market lost their lives because of the shooter’s racism is “sick,” said Steve Carlson, 29, who is Black and grew up knowing Katherine Massey, one of the victims.
“It’s not right. You don’t pick what ethnicity you’re born to,” Carlson said. “These people were just shopping, they went to go get food for their families.”
At State Tabernacle Church of God in Christ, Deacon Heyward Patterson was mourned during services Sunday. Pastor Russell Bell couldn’t wrap his mind around the attack and Patterson’s death.
“I don’t understand what that is, to hate people just because of their color, to hate people because we’re different. God made us all different. That’s what makes the world go ’round,” he said.
But as abhorrent as the shooting was, it was hardly an isolated incident. The history of the United States is filled with white supremacist violence, starting from even before its official origins.
Black people have borne and continue to bear the brunt of much of it, but other groups have also been targeted in attacks because of their race, including Latinos in the 2019 shooting at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, where 22 people were killed.
Gunmen with biases against religion and sexual orientation have also carried out targeted violence: the shootings at a San Diego synagogue in 2019 and a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, in 2016.
Democratic Florida state Rep. Carlos Guillermo Smith, who is gay and of Peruvian descent, immediately had flashbacks to the Pulse nightclub shooting that left 49 victims dead. The shooter targeted gay patrons in what was a largely Latino crowd.
“It’s déjà vu all over again in Orlando,” said Smith, who represents an Orlando district. “2016 seems like a long time ago, but in 2022 there’s a lot more hatred and bigotry out there.”
Experiencing violence of any kind is obviously traumatic, but the impact of targeted violence like this has ripples on a broader level.
“To be targeted for these things that you cannot control, it’s not only extremely painful emotionally, but it also impacts the way you perceive the world going forward after that,” said Michael Edison Hayden, spokesperson for the Southern Poverty Law Center, which advocates for civil rights.
Hate crime laws are on the books in recognition of that reality. The effect of events like these is “you’ve increased the vulnerability of everyone who looks like the target,” said Jeannine Bell, a professor at Indiana University’s Maurer School of Law. “This is a different type of crime because it impacts not just the victims, but also the community.”
While there’s always hand-wringing and dismay after incidents like these, that hasn’t translated into a commitment to address the bigotry that underlies them, said Cornell Williams Brooks, a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School and former president and CEO of the NAACP.
He’s weary of political leaders’ promises to do more about white supremacist threats and gun violence.
“Count the number of sympathy cards and flowers, prayers and thoughts that have been extended to the victims of mass shootings, to the victims of racialized violence,” he said. “Do we really need (politicians) showing up to our places of worship to help bury our folks and do nothing to stop the carnage?”
In Buffalo on Monday, state Assembly Majority Leader Crystal Peoples-Stokes, whose district includes the city, demanded a different response after this shooting.
“There are a lot of people in this community who are hurting because they know that ‘justice for all’ is not specific enough,” said Peoples-Stokes, who is Black. “Sometimes people get left out of that justice. This can’t happen this time.”
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Farrington reported from Tallahassee, Florida. Associated Press writer Carolyn Thompson contributed from Buffalo and Associated Press writer Jennifer Peltz contributed from New York City.
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Hajela and Morrison are based in New York City and are members of the AP’s Race and Ethnicity team. Follow them on Twitter: twitter.com/dhajela and twitter.com/aaronlmorrison
In Buffalo, Biden to confront the racism he’s vowed to fight
WASHINGTON (AP) — When Joe Biden talks about his decision to run against President Donald Trump in 2020, the story always starts with Charlottesville. He says it was the men with torches shouting bigoted slogans that drove him to join what he calls the “battle for the soul of America.”
Now Biden is facing the latest deadly manifestation of hatred after a white supremacist targeted Black people with an assault rifle at a supermarket in Buffalo, the most lethal racist attack since he took office.
The president and first lady Jill Biden are to visit the city on Tuesday.
Biden was the first president to specifically address white supremacy in an inaugural speech, calling it “domestic terrorism that we must confront.” However, such beliefs remain an entrenched threat at a time when his administration has been preoccupied with crises involving the pandemic, inflation and the war in Ukraine.
“It’s important for him to show up for the families and the community and express his condolences,” said Derrick Johnson, the president of the NAACP. “But we’re more concerned with preventing this from happening in the future.”
It’s unclear how Biden will try to do that. Proposals for new gun restrictions have routinely been blocked by Republicans, and the racism that was spouted in Charlottesville, Virginia, appears to have only spread in the five years since.
The White House said the president and first lady will “grieve with the community that lost ten lives in a senseless and horrific mass shooting.” Three more people were wounded. Nearly all of the victims were Black.
Biden was briefed about the shooting by his homeland security adviser, Liz Sherwood-Randall, before he attended church services on Saturday near his family home in Wilmington, Delaware, according to the White House. She called again later to tell him that law enforcement had concluded the attack was racially motivated.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, told a Buffalo radio station that she invited Biden to the city.
“I said, ‘Mr. President, it would be so powerful if you came here,'” Hochul said. “‘This community is in such pain, and to see the president of the United States show them the attention that Buffalo doesn’t always get.'”
On Monday, Biden paid particular tribute to one of the victims, retired police officer Aaron Salter, who was working as a security guard at the store.
He said Salter “gave his life trying to save others” by opening fire at the gunman, only to be killed himself.
Payton Gendron, 18, was arrested at the supermarket and charged with murder. He has pleaded not guilty.
Before the shooting, Gendron is reported to have posted online a screed overflowing with racism and anti-Semitism. The writer of the document described himself as a supporter of Dylan Roof, who killed nine Black parishioners at a church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015, and Brenton Tarrant, who targeted mosques in New Zealand in 2019.
Buffalo Police Commissioner Joseph Gramaglia said Gendron is “someone who has hate in their heart, soul and mind,” and he called the attack on the store “an absolute racist hate crime.”
So far investigators are looking at Gendron’s connection to what’s known as the “great replacement” theory, which baselessly claims white people are being intentionally overrun by other races through immigration or higher birth rates.
The racist ideology is often interwoven with anti-Semitism, with Jews identified as the culprits. During the 2017 “Unite the Right” march in Charlottesville, the white supremacists chanted “Jews will not replace us.”
In the years since, replacement theory has moved from the online fringe to mainstream right-wing politics.
Tucker Carlson, the prominent Fox News host, accuses Democrats of orchestrating mass migration to consolidate their power.
“The country is being stolen from American citizens,” he said Aug. 23, 2021.
He repeated the same theme a month later, saying that “this policy is called the great replacement, the replacement of legacy Americans with more obedient people from faraway countries.”
Carlson’s show routinely receives the highest ratings in cable news.
His commentary reflects how this conspiratorial view of immigration has spread through the Republican Party ahead of this year’s midterm elections, which will determine control of Congress.
Facebook advertisements posted last year by the campaign committee of Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., said Democrats want a “PERMANENT ELECTION INSURRECTION” by granting amnesty to illegal immigrants. The plan would “overthrow our current electorate and create a permanent liberal majority in Washington.”
Alex DeGrasse, a senior advisor to Stefanik’s campaign, said Monday she “has never advocated for any racist position or made a racist statement.” He criticized “sickening and false reporting” about her advertisements.
Stefanik is the third-ranking leader of the House Republican caucus, replacing Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., who angered the party with her denunciations of Trump after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
Cheney, in a tweet on Monday, said the caucus’ leadership “has enabled white nationalism, white supremacy, and anti-Semitism. History has taught us that what begins with words ends in far worse.”
Replacement theory rhetoric has also rippled through Republican primary campaigns.
“The Democrats want open borders so they can bring in and amnesty tens of millions of illegal aliens — that’s their electoral strategy,” Blake Masters, who’s running in the Republican Senate primary in Arizona, wrote on Twitter hours after the Buffalo shooting. “Not on my watch.”
A spokesperson for Masters did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
A third of U.S. adults believe there is “a group of people in this country who are trying to replace native-born Americans with immigrants who agree with their political views,” according to a poll conducted in December by The Associated Press and the NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
Although Biden has not spoken directly about replacement theory, his warnings about racism remain a fixture of his public speeches.
Three days before the Buffalo shooting, at a Democratic fundraiser in Chicago, Biden said, “I really do think we’re still in the battle for the soul of America.”
Biden said he hadn’t planned to run for president in 2020 — he had already fallen short in two previous campaigns, served as vice president and then stepped aside as Hillary Clinton consolidated support for the 2016 race — and was content to spend some time as a professor at the University of Pennsylvania.
But he said he was disgusted “when those folks came marching out of the fields in Charlottesville, Virginia, carrying torches” and repeating the “same anti-Semitic bile chanted in the streets of everywhere from Nuremberg to Berlin in the early ’30s.”
And he recalled how Trump responded to questions about the rally, which resulted in the death of Heather Heyer, a young woman who was there to protest the white supremacists.
“He said there are very good people on both sides,” Biden said.
He added, “We can’t let this happen, guys.”
Johnson, the NAACP president, said the country needs to “finally chart a course so we can as a nation begin to address domestic terrorism as we would foreign terrorism — as aggressively as possible.”
He added, “White supremacy and democracy cannot coexist.”
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Associated Press staff writer Karen Matthews contributed from New York.