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A young woman lights candles at a memorial outside the Tops Friendly Market in Buffalo where 10 Black people were killed on Saturday.
A young woman lights candles at a memorial outside the Tops Friendly Market in Buffalo where 10 Black people were killed on Saturday. Photograph: Scott Olson/Getty Images
A young woman lights candles at a memorial outside the Tops Friendly Market in Buffalo where 10 Black people were killed on Saturday. Photograph: Scott Olson/Getty Images

Buffalo shooting: gunman plotted attack for months

This article is more than 1 year old

Online posts apparently by 18-year-old suspect Payton Gendron indicate previous visit to site where 10 Black people were killed

The 18-year-old white man accused of fatally shooting 10 people – most of whom were Black – at a Buffalo supermarket detailed his plans of staging the massacre in a series of online statements over the past five months.

Upon reviewing 672 pages of messages posted online by a user who identified himself as suspected killer Payton Gendron, the Washington Post found that he had made plans as early as December to murder those he regarded as “replacers” – a reference to the racist conspiracy theory that open immigration policies and high birthrates for Black people are being promoted to displace white voters.

According to his messages, many of which were featured on the platform Discord, Gendron identified Buffalo’s Tops grocery store as “attack area 1” due to its proximity to a predominantly Black neighborhood. He also identified two other locations in Buffalo as places to “shoot all blacks.” Gendron’s messages mapped out routes to all locations, provided exact times for the shootings to occur, and estimated that at least three dozen people could be killed.

The FBI’s top agent in Buffalo, Stephen Belongia, indicated on a call with other officials on Monday that investigators are looking at Gendron’s Discord activity, citing posts last summer about body armour and guns and others last month in which he taunted federal authorities. Belongia gave no details in the call, a recording of which the AP obtained.

Prior to targeting Buffalo, Gendron had purportedly considered attacking Rochester. However, the Post reported, he eventually pivoted to Buffalo due to its higher population of Black people. “New plan,” Gendron posted online on 17 February, adding, “TOPS Friendly Markets” and “damn that is looking good.”

Other locations Gendron had allegedly considered included churches and schools. “I would consider breaking into a Buffalo elementary school but those places are locked up tight plus I get a strange feeling when thinking avout massacreing (sic) children,” he wrote.

In its investigation, the Washington Post also found a “wide-ranging” journal in which Gendron detailed his process of killing and mutilating a cat. He also wrote about his experience of being taken for a psychiatric evaluation after he once announced in class that he was planning on committing “murder/suicide,” according to the Post.

Gendron went on to reveal that the case was dropped after he said he was just joking around to get out of class.

“That is the reason I believe I am still able to purchase guns,” he wrote. “It was not a joke, I wrote that down because that’s what I was planning to do.”

The Post’s investigation also discovered that in November, Gendron posted a copy of a manifesto to Discord. The manifesto belonged to Brenton Tarrant, an Australian white supremacist who killed 51 Muslims in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019. In a separate 4chan message board that month, Gendron claimed authorship of an anonymous post that said “a brenton tarrant event will happen again soon.”

On 5 December, he wrote, “I will carry out an attack against the replacers, and will even livestream the attack.”

In a separate 180-page racist diatribe that Gendron is suspected of posting online, he repeatedly refers to the “great replacement,” an extremist conspiracy theory. The theory promotes a set of racist and antisemetic paranoid lies including the myth that an elite faction of Jews and Democrats is “replacing” white Americans with Black, Hispanic and other people of color with the intention of exterminating the white race.

Further messages by Gendron revealed that he had been scouting out the Tops supermarket repeatedly. According to his posts, there were “many” Black people inside the store, including two security guards who were carrying pistols.

He described an incident in which he was confronted by one of the guards after he entered the store three times in a day. “I’ve seen you go in and out … What are you doing?” Gendron recalled the guard saying.

Gendron said that he was “collecting consensus data,” the Post reported.

“In hindsight that was a close call,” he added. Gendron also went on to detail how he had a panic attack while driving back from the store that day and crashed his car into a pole. Nevertheless, he “overall had a nice full-day experience,” he wrote.

At one point in March, a speeding ticket notice issued to Gendron arrived at his parents’ home. “[N]ow my dad knows I was hours away doing something I shouldn’t have,” wrote Gendron, before adding that he lied to his father that he had skipped school to go hiking that day.

The Post’s investigation also found that Gendron took note of law enforcement’s apparent disinterest in him. “[H]mm I wonder why the FBI isn’t tackling me right now? probably because they want it to happen,” he wrote in April in a post that featured pictures of various guns.

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The memorial outside the Buffalo store. Photograph: Brendan McDermid/Reuters

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  • The Buffalo mass shooting comes amid rise in racial violence in US

  • Buffalo shooting: Biden says racist killing of 10 people ‘abhorrent to fabric of nation’

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