The racist Buffalo shooter who is a white gunman accused of killing ten Black people in a mass shooting at a Buffalo supermarket pleaded not guilty to federal hate crime charges that could result in the death penalty on Monday.
Last week, the Buffalo shooter was charged with hate crimes and armed robbery. His attorney entered the plea in court, saying she hoped to settle the case before trial. Payton Gendron, who was dressed in an orange jumpsuit and shackles, remained silent during the brief arraignment.
The 27-count federal indictment includes special findings, such as the attacker engaged in extensive planning to commit terrorism and targeted vulnerable older people, specifically 86-year-old Ruth Whitfield, 77-year-old Pearl Young, 72-year-old Katherine Massey, 67-year-old Heyward Patterson, and 65-year-old Celestine Chaney.
Attorney General Merrick Garland, who put a halt to federal executions last year, has not ruled out seeking the death penalty for the gunman, who turned 19 in June. According to the Justice Department, a decision on whether to seek the death penalty will be made later.
The Buffalo shooter was apprehended just outside the Tops Friendly Markets entrance after live streaming the May 14 attack. He had opened fire on weekend shoppers and employees in the parking lot and inside the store while wearing body armor. Three people were hurt.
“We’re all aware he’s guilty. “We saw what he did,” Zeneta Everhart said following the court hearing. Zaire Goodman, her son, was injured in the attack. “The entire world witnessed what he did. He documented what he did.”
Investigators believe the shooter drove for more than three hours from his home in Conklin, New York, to a busy grocery store in a predominantly Black neighborhood, with the intention of killing as many Black people as possible. They claimed he was motivated by white supremacist beliefs expressed in online diary entries.
The work of Michael Woodley, a Briton racist researcher who was cited by the teenager who killed 10 Black people at a supermarket in Buffalo, included pseudoscientific theories that have been used to justify racism.
The researcher claims there has been an I.Q. decline in France linked to large-scale migration from North Africa. He has co-written a book about the global decline of intelligence, stating a relationship between ethnicity and cognitive abilities. And he argues that humans can be divided into subspecies, a cornerstone of white supremacist ideology.
He was also cited, among other academic references, in a manifesto written by the teenager motivated by racist views who killed 10 Black people at a supermarket in Buffalo last month.
Despite his own extreme views, the researcher, Michael Woodley — a 38-year-old British man — has been affiliated with Vrije Universiteit Brussel, one of Belgium’s leading universities, and his controversial work was originally undertaken as he studied at some of the world’s most prestigious academic institutions.
The discovery that the gunman had cited Mr. Woodley’s work shocked many academics, who said they hoped it might now force institutions to confront questions about their responsibility toward society, academic rigor and the space they give to extremist ideas.
Alex Mas Sandoval, a Spanish researcher in population genetics at the University of Bologna, said he was “appalled” when he heard that the Buffalo gunman had tried to use science to justify his actions.
Scientists involved in the field of population genetics and other related areas were “concerned about the misinterpretation of our findings,” he said, adding that he had scrutinized the manifesto for all references to his field.
“In most cases, the killer decontextualized scientific conclusions,” he said. But, he added, one person cited by the gunman stood out for his extreme views: Mr. Woodley, whose expertise is in plant ecology, but whose work also includes research in human genetics and intelligence.
Tension choked the air when a ten-foot-tall cross, wrapped in gasoline-soaked rags, burned wildly, as if to set the night on fire. The cross burned in the fall of 1980, on Jefferson Avenue, which runs through several Black neighborhoods that constitute the East Side of Buffalo, New York, and it punctuated a wave of terror in and around the city.
A month earlier, on September 22nd, a Black fourteen-year-old boy had been shot in the head three times. Over the next two days, three other Black men were shot and killed.
After ballistics testing, the police concluded that all four had been killed by the same weapon. Then, in early October, the bodies of two more Black men were found, beaten and stabbed to death. Both men had had their hearts cut out of their chests.
Several days after that, the cross was lit ablaze. The following day, on October 10th, a nurse walked in on a white man trying to strangle a Black man who was lying prone in a hospital bed.
He survived, but the attack left him incapacitated and in need of surgery. In the course of those weeks, six African American males had been viciously murdered.
The streak of deaths overlapped with a series of bewildering disappearances of Black children in Atlanta, which came to be known as the Atlanta child murders, heightening the terror.
In Black neighborhoods across Buffalo, rumors swirled that the killings were the work of the Ku Klux Klan. During one of the funerals, the Associated Press reported, two carloads of whites drove by with a “mannequin with grotesque, red painted head wounds,” and threw red paint on the hearse.
City officials scoffed at the idea that organized racists were involved in the killings, and a state N.A.A.C.P. official allowed that the attacks may have been committed by a single killer.
On May 14 in Buffalo, New York, an 18-year-old named Payton Gendron, armed with a semi-automatic weapon and a violent, racial ideology called the “Great Replacement” theory, opened fire at a Tops supermarket in Masten.
Gendron methodically killed 10 people and injured three. Eleven of the thirteen people shot were Black.
In conversations surrounding the shooting, sources have discussed the two-front war of white supremacy and racial segregation, but these issues are not separate.
They are one and the same, and the city of Pittsburgh harbors the same roots of systemic racism that prop up shootings like the one in Buffalo.
As details on the Buffalo shooting unraveled, it became obvious that the attack was a hate crime. Prior to the massacre, Gendron had posted a racist manifesto online.
The N-word was written on the gun he used in his attack. He had researched the local demographics to ensure that he could kill as many Black people as possible and drove over three hours to take advantage of the neighborhood’s concentration of Black people.
The shooting was a strategic move, purposefully targeting a grocery store that lay in the center of Buffalo’s Black community. But how did Black residents become so concentrated in the region?
The city of Buffalo has a long history of racial inequality and segregation within its schools, housing developments and health systems. The community is victim to abysmal school funding, lack of affordable housing and poor health outcomes because of these forms of racism.
If you are familiar with Pittsburgh’s history, then these details may sound alarmingly familiar. Pittsburgh’s history of racial inequality mirrors Buffalo’s.
Before Gendron’s attack, the community of Masten was already experiencing compounding layers of racism. The city of Buffalo is one of the most segregated cities in the United States.
As the Black population began to increase after World War l, racist restrictive covenants barred Black residents from buying homes.
Less than an hour after the city of Buffalo, New York, took a 123-second pause on Saturday to memorialize the victims of the terrorist attack that shook the city a week ago, June Bloomfield held her own moment of silence.
Standing outside the Tops Market, the only grocery store in the area, where white supremacy stole the lives of 10 people, Bloomfield’s tears were obscured by sunglasses, a mask and her quiet resolve.
“It’s not fear”, she said, trying to summon the words that described her feelings. “It’s … All I can say is, I’m not afraid.”
On Saturday, the residents of Buffalo’s East Side took part in the traditional Black gathering ritual that finds solace in music, food and – most of all –togetherness. Buffalo
Throughout the day, a dense, almost palpable fog of grief wafted through Buffalo’s East Side air, sitting on the collective chest of an entire neighborhood, refusing to move.
Yet, alongside the alchemy of producing Black joy from pain, there arose one almost unanimous consensus among the unpublished, uncounted victims.
If the alleged mass murderer’s goal was to inflict terror, then the man responsible for this trauma failed miserably. There is no terror here.
For Sabrina Madison, the violent tragedy served as both a teaching moment for her daughters and an opportunity for the city to eliminate the daily dose of white supremacy swallowed by the people who live on the East Side.
Madison hoped that the events would awaken people everywhere to the inequality that exists in neighborhoods like the one where she was born and raised but she also knows that it won’t be easy – someone must make it happen.
“I drive my 12-year-old past here to her art lessons every day,” said the mother of two. “When this happened, I explained to her what happened and we started talking about what a food desert was and how it affects the community.”
Last Saturday, racist and horrifying violence took the lives of 10 people in Buffalo who were just trying to make a living for their families or to get some shopping errands done.
It injured three other persons as well, along with traumatizing many more. The trauma extends to the Diocese of Syracuse where this Saturday a funeral Mass will be celebrated at Assumption Church for one of our own parishioners and a victim of the shooting, Roberta A. Drury. Buffalo
Our hearts and deepest sympathy and prayers go out to Roberta’s family and friends, as well as, to all the victims’ families and loved ones.
We hold close in prayer also all those who were injured and all those who witnessed and are affected by such unconscionable violence.
As a local church, we are deeply disturbed also that the alleged perpetrator of this heinous crime is an 18-year-old from the Southern Tier of our diocese.
Where from or wherein is such hatred and violence being brought forth as to export such unconceivable crimes against the sacredness of the human person no matter gender, color or creed?
I wish to remind all Catholics of the grave sin that racism is and the ever present need to eradicate from both our society and nation.
In 2020, the US Catholic Bishops issued the document, “Open Wide Our Hearts: The Enduring Call to Love – A Pastoral Letter Against Racism.”
In it the bishops reiterated the Church’s teaching on racism: “Racism is evil because it attacks the inherent dignity of the human person, created in the image and likeness of God.
The persistence of racism demands our attention now. Racism emerges in the actions and inactions of individuals; and it is embedded in our institutions and public policies.
Our faith calls us both to personal conversion and to transformation of our society.”
Joe Biden did not mention Tucker Carlson’s name this week as the US president sought to meld outrage with comfort in a speech to Americans reeling from the deadly Buffalo shooting , New York.
Yet the conservative firebrand Fox News host, along with other figures in rightwing American media and politics, was clearly front of mind for Biden and many fellow Democrats as they reacted to the latest episode of white supremacist violence in the country.
“We have to not only talk about how we’re going to end the hate, but who’s responsible for generating it,” Biden said on Tuesday during a visit to Buffalo.
“You have folks on television stations talking about the ‘replacement theory’, scaring the living hell out of people who don’t have a whole lot of emotional stability.”
The Buffalo shooting rampage — in which a lone 18-year-old gunman killed 10 people, eight of them African-American — has resulted in fresh scrutiny of conservative media figures and Republican lawmakers accused of embracing, sympathising with and acquiescing to views on race and immigration that have moved into the terrain of extremist falsehoods.
The most prominent of these is the “great replacement” theory, which has been gaining ground over the past decade within the conservative Republican base and among supporters of former president Donald Trump.
Echoing rhetoric that has emerged on the European far right in connection with migration, it falsely contends that minorities are plotting with Democrats to illegitimately seize political power by gaining a demographic advantage in the country.
“Those who espouse this replacement theory are trying to redefine who can be and who is an American, and redefine those who are not white as outsiders and as invaders,” said Danilo Zak, a policy and advocacy manager at the National Immigration Forum, a Washington think-tank.
“It has become a more mainstream idea and that’s because the dialogue around immigration and immigrants has become increasingly unhealthy,” he added.
The teenage US shooter charged with shooting dead 10 African Americans at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York followed an insidious racist creed gaining ground among white Americans that minorities are taking over society.
The 18-year-old suspect Payton Gendron took explicit inspiration from the white supremacist gunman who murdered 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand in 2019.
The Christchurch killer had warned in a manifesto of a “Great Replacement“ of white Christians of European descent by Blacks, Jews, Muslims, Latinos and others, a theory that has found an increasing echo in American right-wing politics and on cable news.
Lifting often word-for-word from the rambling text, Gendron produced a chilling 180-page manifesto of his own — in which he stated his goal: to “kill as many Blacks as possible.”
Gendron himself came from a rural town in New York state that had a very small number of non-white residents.
He learned his hate almost exclusively online, a pattern of “radicalization” that law enforcement authorities say has only increased in recent years to become a major threat for the United States.
Gendron drove 200 miles (320 kilometers) to the Tops market in Buffalo to carry out his attack in a neighborhood he knew had a large African American population, during the busiest shopping period of the week.
Despite its links to mass murders, the “Grand Replacement“ conspiracy theory has become increasingly mainstream in conservative circles in Europe and the United States in the past decade.
It was touted at a 2017 national gathering of right wing groups in Charlottesville, Virginia.
And it was cited by the man who shot dead 22 people, many of them Latinos, at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas in August 2019, and who declared he was “defending my country from cultural and ethnic replacement brought on by an invasion.”
On Saturday, in the parking lot of a neighborhood grocery store, an eighteen-year-old armed with a semi-automatic assault rifle, the N-word emblazoned on its front sight, began shooting.
Shots cracked in the air, piercing through an unusually warm eighty-degree spring afternoon in Buffalo, New York. The teen-ager, who was later identified by the police, donned military-esque camouflage, was draped in body armor, and wore a camera to capture his bloody rampage.
When the shooting stopped, thirteen people had been hit, ten of them killed. Eleven of those shot were Black. The gunman was captured by the police when he left the grocery store, and, by late Saturday night, he was arraigned on charges of first-degree Racists murder.
The shooter is alleged to have posted a hundred-and-eighty-page “manifesto” avowing white-supremacist beliefs. In the hate-filled text, he denounced immigrants and Black people as “replacers” of white people.
The notion that white people are being replaced has recently moved from the fringe of far-right politics to mainstream Republican Party politics.
The Fox News personality Tucker Carlson has helped to popularize the ideology, and it has dovetailed seamlessly with the rhetoric of the Republican Party, which has insisted on describing the arrival of migrants at the southern border—seeking entry into the U.S. as asylum seekers—as an “invasion.”
The shooter rationalized his vicious attack by trying to fit it into this grand, esoteric conspiracy of white replacement through immigration.
His manifesto, by contrast, is filled with crudely racist memes about Black Americans. In fact, for all his denunciation of “replacers” in the manifesto, an archive of his posts on the messaging platform Discord, from the past six months, barely mentions immigrants.
Instead, he writes prolifically and disparagingly about Black people, whom he incessantly describes with racial slurs. In a search of archived posts beginning in 2021, the word “immigrant” appears twelve times, “replacement” eighteen times, “replacer” twenty-two times, but “blacks” and the N-word each appear a hundred times.
A New York man has been charged with a hate crime after attacking an Asian American woman in Grand Island, outside of Buffalo.
Charles Vacanti, 46, allegedly yelled racist slurs at the woman before hitting her in the face with a pool cue at a bar on March 19 around 4 a.m.
The victim received stitches for a cut to her upper lip and suffered from pain and swelling to her nose and mouth, according to the Erie County District Attorney’s Office. A temporary order of protection was issued on behalf of the victim, the report said.
Erie County District Attorney John J. Flynn announced at a news conference last week that Vacanti was arraigned on one count of assault in the second degree as a hate crime and one count of criminal possession of a weapon in the fourth degree.
Vacanti was arrested on April 20 after witnesses and employees at the bar helped lead investigators to him, Erie County Sheriff John Garcia said during the presser.
Five witnesses at the bar said they saw Vacanti leave after the incident, Garcia said.
Garcia declined to comment on how the incident started.
“They did not know each other. Now how they came about the altercation, that’s something I’d rather not comment on right now. What I could tell you is, prior to the defendant striking the victim, he did use some racial slurs and then struck the victim,” he said.
The Erie County Sheriff’s office declined to offer further comment.
Vacanti has been assigned legal representation but has not entered a plea or commented on the proceeding.
The attack came a month after research spearheaded by the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum revealed that 74 percent of Asian American and Pacific Islander women reported having personally experienced racism or discrimination in the last 12 months.