Suspect in Buffalo shooting was investigated last year over threat

BUFFALO — New York state leaders pledged to explore stronger regulations on social media companies, as well as gun manufacturers and distributors, after a racially motivated shooting at a supermarket left 10 dead.

“I’m calling out the social media platforms where this hate can be spewed,” Gov. Kathy Hochul (D), a Buffalo native, said Sunday during remarks at Macedonia Missionary Baptist Church, one of the oldest Black churches in Buffalo. “People are learning how to create guns and violence and weapons and the dissemination of this virus called White supremacy.”

The suspect allegedly live-streamed his assault on the streaming service Twitch, where it was quickly taken down. Officials said the suspect also appears to have written a 180-page declaration asserting he was radicalized online by browsing social media platforms and racist message boards. Police have arrested and charged 18-year-old Payton Gendron in connection with the shooting. Gendron has pleaded not guilty.

Attorney General Letitia James (D) told the crowd that Hochul asked her office “to determine whether or not social media had an influence on this sick, demented young gentleman who was fed a daily diet of hate. I will also be looking at guns and as we seek to hold some gun manufacturers and gun distributors liable.”

Gunmakers and sellers are generally immune from civil lawsuits if weapons they made or sold are used in attacks.

James, who is Black, compared the shooting to a “lynching.” She invoked the abduction, torture and slaying of Emmett Till in 1955 and the 2015 attack on Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in South Carolina that left nine worshipers dead.

“I had to come to Buffalo because I thought about Emmett Till,” she said “I thought about our history. I thought about slavery, reconstruction, Jim Crow."

James also led the congregation with a couple of songs.

“I thought about all the pain and struggle and poverty,” James added. "People are in a lot of pain.”

The Buffalo neighborhood where a gunman launched an attack at a Tops Friendly Markets grocery store is home to one of the largest shares of Black residents in the state and the largest in western New York, according to U.S. census data.

The suspect detailed a plan to target the Black community in a lengthy online diatribe that authorities believe he wrote.

A separate set of documents — transcripts from the online instant messaging platform Discord, also apparently written by the suspect — show the author zeroing in on the specific Zip code of the store because of the area’s high percentage of Black residents. Ten people were killed and three were injured Saturday.

About 73 percent of people who live in the Zip code 14208 are Black, census data shows. Only 10 other Zip codes in New York are home to a larger percentage of Black residents.

When Tops Friendly Markets opened a supermarket in Buffalo’s Masten Park neighborhood 19 years ago, it was a joyous occasion with music, cake and smiles. Residents who had been calling for a supermarket in the neighborhood for more than a decade finally had one, as the Buffalo News reported.

Now, the massacre that left 10 people dead will forever cast a shadow on the grocery store that’s been central to the neighborhood for nearly two decades. The chain’s management said the store would remain closed indefinitely, making it more difficult for residents in the neighborhood, which some have referred to as a former “food desert,” to get regular and reliable access to food.

“Tops has been committed to this community and to the city of Buffalo for decades and this tragedy will not change that commitment,” a Tops spokeswoman said in a statement to The Post on Sunday.

The company said it would provide free shuttle bus service to an alternate Tops location, a 15-minute drive north, running from midmorning to early evening. And it said company officials were coordinating with local lawmakers hand out free food in the community.

Masten Park’s residents are 88 percent Black, according to city data. Eleven of the 13 people injured in the shooting were Black, law enforcement officials said, and the shooting is being investigated as a racially-motivated hate crime.

Robert Nailor, 58, a lifelong neighborhood resident, told The Washington Post that he usually visits Tops two or three times a day, saying he had been in the store shortly before the shooting broke out, but wasn’t there when it happened. Nailor added that a lot of damage had been done, yet he was confident it the neighborhood would bounce back.

“Today is going to be rough. Tomorrow is going to be rough,” he said Saturday. “But eventually, as time goes on, we can learn from this and grow as a community.”

Two law enforcement officials said the gunman arrested in connection with the shooting in Buffalo was investigated less than a year ago by state police for making a threatening statement.

They spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation.

A state police spokesman said that on June 8, 2021, officials “responded to Susquehanna High School in Conklin, NY, to investigate a report that a 17-year-old student had made a threatening statement.” The spokesman did not identify the student, citing state privacy laws.

“The student was taken into custody” under a provision of the state’s mental health law “and transported to the hospital for a mental health evaluation.” The individual was not charged.

Buffalo’s police commissioner, Joseph Gramaglia, confirmed the episode, saying that state officers had taken the suspect to a hospital, where he was evaluated and then let go.

“The information we have is he was there for a day and a half, was evaluated and then released at that point,” Gramaglia said at a Sunday news briefing, adding that state police “did their job to the fullest they could at that time.”

He said the threatening statement reported at the suspect’s high school was “a generalized threat, not a specific threat made at a specific place or person.” Asked whether the threat was racist, Gramaglia said that it was not.

The Buffalo News reported that the teen had made comments that raised concerns he might be planning to conduct a mass shooting timed around his high school graduation.

BUFFALO — At 2:30 p.m. on Saturday, Julie Harwell was at Tops Friendly Market picking up some hamburgers and hot dogs for her birthday barbecue. Her partner, Lamont Thomas, and 8-year-old daughter, London Thomas, sneaked away across the store to buy mix for a birthday cake.

Harwell turned 33 on Sunday.

London picked out a strawberry cake with vanilla icing.

Then the shooting started.

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The details about the Buffalo shooting that have emerged so far fit with grim patterns seen in past mass killings.

Researchers and experts studying mass violence have found common elements, many of which appear to have recurred in Buffalo.

Active shooters are usually male, researchers have found, who were fueled by some kind of grievance. Rather than snapping seemingly without any warning, most attackers often spent time plotting beforehand, the FBI found in a 2018 study examining active shooters.

These attackers also tended to alarm people around them before opening fire, the FBI study found, and more than half had made clear in some fashion that they intended to commit violence.

The online screed investigators say was posted by the Buffalo gunman also fit another unnerving pattern, in which mass killers often research or draw inspiration from their predecessors.

The document posted online cites by name several other convicted or accused mass killers, including the avowed white supremacist convicted of killing nine Black parishioners in Charleston, S.C., in 2015, and the man charged with killing 23 people at a Walmart in El Paso in 2019. Police in El Paso say he confessed to the shooting and said he was targeting “Mexicans,” and officials say he wrote an online statement ranting about a “Hispanic invasion of Texas.”

President Biden on Sunday opened his remarks at the National Peace Officers’ Memorial Service with prayers for the victims of the mass shooting in Buffalo on Saturday.

“A lone gunman armed with weapons of war and [a] hate-filled soul shot and killed 10 innocent people in cold blood at a grocery store on Saturday afternoon,” Biden said. “Jill and I, like all of you, pray for the victims and their families and a devastated community.”

Biden said the White House was in close contact with the Justice Department, which was still gathering facts about the shooting. However, he noted that the Justice Department had already stated it was investigating the matter as a hate crime — a “racially motivated act of white supremacy and violent extremism.”

“As they do, we must all work together to address the hate that remains a stain on the soul of America,” Biden said. “Hearts are heavy once again, but our resolve must never, ever waver. No one understands more than the people sitting in front of me — moms, dads, children, family members — about how those folks in Buffalo feel today.”

The annual National Peace Officers’ Memorial Service honors law enforcement officers who lost their lives in the line of duty the previous year. One of the victims in Buffalo on Saturday was Aaron Salter Jr., a security guard on duty who was a retired police officer.

In the rest of his speech, Biden vowed to support more funding, not less, for law enforcement, and said the job of being a police officer was “so much more complicated” than it had ever been.

According to the White House, Biden spoke with New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) and reached out to Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown on Sunday to offer his condolences and support.

BUFFALO — As law enforcement officials dive deeper into the movement of an 18-year-old accused of killing 10 people at a supermarket here, some local residents say they believe they recognize suspect Payton Gendron from previous visits to the area.

Daniel Love, who owns a barbershop across the street from the Tops Friendly Market, the scene of the killings, said he and co-workers saw a man they believe to be Gendron on Friday sitting on the curb outside the shop at about 6 p.m.

The Washington Post could not independently verify that the man seen by Love was the suspect.

“He was sitting there using the WiFi,” Love said. “I asked him if he needed a chair. He said, ‘No, I’m good.’”

He didn’t think much of it at the time, because it’s not unusual for teens in the neighborhood to gather in the parking lot to use the public WiFi from the M&T Bank next door.

But the man was alone, Love said, wearing a black T-shirt with “genius” written on the front, a brown zip-up hoodie and shorts. He appeared preoccupied, Love said.

He stayed on the curb even after Love closed his shop around 7 p.m. and went to a bar down the street with friends. Love said he was leery of leaving his business with the man sitting outside, because his dog, Buzz Buzz, was alone in the building and Love’s store had been vandalized previously.

Law enforcement officials initially expressed doubt that Gendron had been in the Buffalo area soon before the shooting; Gendron’s home in Conklin, N.Y., is more than 200 miles southeast, near the Pennsylvania border.

But according to an online document that investigators now say with increasing confidence is linked to Gendron, he had allegedly been planning the shooting at this grocery store — in the heart of Buffalo’s Black community — since January.

“For him to have all that information about how he was going to come down Jefferson Avenue and how he was going to shoot, it had to be planned,” Love said.

On Saturday, when shots first rang out around 2:30 p.m., Love said he was outside his barbershop smoking. He scurried back inside thinking the shooting would stop quickly. Gun violence related to petty crime is not uncommon in this neighborhood, residents lament.

But the shooting persisted, with too many rounds fired to count, Love said. When sound of gunshots stopped, he crept out of his shop with a co-worker to see the gunman dressed in camouflage fatigues and body armor being detained and loaded into a police vehicle.

"I said, ‘He must have spared me,’” Love said. “I had just offered him a chair the day before.”