Payton Gendron, the 18-year-old accused of killing 10 people at a Buffalo supermarket, was formally charged Wednesday.
Gendron has been indicted by a grand jury for a domestic act of terrorism motivated by hate, 10 counts of first-degree murder, 10 counts of second-degree murder as a hate crime, three counts of attempted murder as a hate crime and criminal possession of a weapon.
The grand jury said Gendron’s alleged massacre played out “because of the perceived race and/or color” of his victims, thus the hate charge.
If convicted, Gendron faces life in prison without parole.
Gendron, armed with an AR-15-style rifle, opened fire outside the Tops Friendly Market on May 14, then continued into the store, according to police. Of the 13 victims, 11 were Black, including all 10 fatalities.
“This was pure evil,” Erie County Sheriff John Garcia said, calling the massacre a “straight-up racially motivated hate crime from somebody outside of our community.”
In a 180-page manifesto in Gendron’s name and posted online, the teenager, who allegedly drove hours from his home town of Conklin, New York, wrote that he targeted Buffalo because it had the “highest Black percentage that is close enough to where I live.” He also allegedly had the N-word painted on the barrel of his modified assault weapon.
Gendron also described himself as a fascist, a white supremacist and an anti-Semite, and wrote fondly of Christchurch, New Zealand, shooter Brenton Tarrant, who murdered 51 people at two New Zealand mosques in 2019; Dylann Roof, who killed nine Black people at a church in South Carolina in 2015; and Anders Breivik, who killed 77 people in Norway in 2011.
In an online chatroom opened just before the shooting, Gendron livestreamed the massacre and shared screeds, including his plans dating back months to scope out the grocery store and its security. In more than 600 pages, Gendron allegedly detailed killing and mutilating a cat and being committed to a medical facility for psychiatric evaluation after he told his high school class that he planned to commit “murder/suicide,” according to The Washington Post.
Buffalo Police Commissioner Joseph Gramaglia said last month that investigators believe Gendron planned to continue his attack after Tops, but was instead talked down by officers who took him into custody.
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