A man suddenly charged at the convicted mass shooter behind last year’s Buffalo, New York supermarket massacre during a court hearing on Wednesday.
Police rushed the shooter, Payton Gendron, out of the room as courtroom guards struggled to detain the man who ran at him during his sentencing hearing.
Video shows the man, dressed all in gray, standing behind a woman as she emotionally condemns the shooter’s racist beliefs. The man pushes her aside and takes several quick steps toward Gendron, seated at the other end of the room, before the man is surrounded by bystanders.
The man shouted “You don’t know what we’re going through” as guards hauled him away, the Associated Press reported. Gendron came back into the courtroom about 10 minutes later as Judge Susan Eagan urged those present to “conduct ourselves appropriately.”
“I understand that emotion, and I understand the anger, but we cannot have that in the courtroom,” she said.
Later in the hearing, Gendron, 19, was sentenced to life in prison after briefly apologizing to victims of the May 14 shooting, in which 10 black people were killed and three other individuals were injured, AP reported.
The woman speaking to Gendron prior to him being rushed was Barbara Massey Mapps, whose 72-year-old sister Katherine Massey was among those killed.
“You gonna come to our city and decide you don’t like black people. Man, you don’t know a damn thing about black people,” Mapps said, according to the video. “We’re human. We like our kids to go to good schools. We love our kids. We’d never go in no neighborhoods and take people out.”
Officials said Gendron traveled about three-and-a-half hours to Buffalo for the shooting, writing in a racist manifesto that he selected the area because many black people live there, CBS News reported.
He pleaded guilty in November to multiple charges, including murder as a hate crime and hate-motivated domestic terrorism, which carries an automatic life sentence with no possibility of parole, as reported by AP.
This was a breaking news story. The details were periodically updated as more information became available.
