US mourn victims of racist mass shooting at store

BUFFALO — Shocked residents of Buffalo, New York gathered on Sunday at vigils and church services to mourn 10 people fatally shot by an alleged white supremacist in an act one official described as “domestic terrorism, pure and simple”.

The suspected shooter, identified as 18-year-old Payton Gendron, was arrested at the scene, a grocery store in a predominantly Black neighbourhood after police rushed to respond to emergency calls.

He had driven from his home town of Conklin, more than 320 kilometres away, police said.

Gendron was arraigned late Saturday on a single count of first-degree murder and held without bail, the Erie County district attorney’s office said. He pleaded not guilty.

The shooter was wearing body armour, carried an assault rifle and live-streamed the attack, police said, adding that of the 10 dead and three wounded, 11 were African Americans.

‘Military-style execution’ 

Residents gathered outside the store for the vigil, while New York Governor Kathy Hochul, the state’s Attorney General Letitia James and Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown addressed a service at the city’s True Bethel Baptist Church.

In alternately angry and mournful tones, speakers denounced the latest eruption of racist violence and the ready availability of high-power guns in what has become a sadly familiar scene across America.

Hochul, herself a Buffalo native, described the crime as a “military-style execution” — she said the shooter carried an AR-15 assault weapon — and said racist messaging was “spreading like wildfire”.

Hochul called on officials of both political parties to “make sure these people crawl back into their holes and stay there”.

Speaking on ABC, she described social media as “instruments of this evil”, saying the platforms allowed racist themes to “spread like a virus”.

The attack evoked memories of some of the worst racist attacks in recent US history, including the 2015 killing by a young white man of nine worshippers in a Black church in South Carolina, and the 2019 attack by a white man in Texas that claimed 23 lives, most of them Latino.

Attorney General James, who is Black, described Saturday’s attack as “domestic terrorism, plain and simple” and said the shooter would be prosecuted “to the fullest extent of the law”.

Mayor Brown, speaking on Sunday on CNN, admonished “lawmakers in Washington” who he said “fail to act” on gun control.

“The message to this country is these mass shootings have to end. There has to be sensible gun control,” Brown said.

“Enough is enough.”

‘Mother and missionary’ 

The gunman shot four people in the store’s parking lot, three of them fatally, before entering the supermarket.

Among those killed inside was a retired police officer working as a security guard. He fired several shots at the assailant before being shot himself, police said.

When police arrived, the shooter put the gun to his neck, but was talked down and surrendered.

The victims were ordinary shoppers and store workers.

One, according to a Twitter post, was a 77-year-old “mother, grandma and missionary” who “loved singing, dancing and being with family” and who for 25 years had run a weekly pantry to feed the poor.

At a Sunday vigil in Buffalo’s Elim Christian Fellowship church, pastor T. Anthony Bronner urged both prayer and political action.

“Some of us are very angry this morning,” he said, but “we respond in prayer — and we respond on our feet”.

Hate crime 

The shooting is being investigated as a hate crime and “racially motivated violent extremism”, Stephen Belongia, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Buffalo field office, told reporters.

Media reports linked the shooter to a 180-page manifesto that described a white supremacist ideology and laid out a plan to target a mainly Black neighbourhood.

A spokesperson for streaming service Twitch told AFP the shooter used the platform to broadcast the attack live, and that the company had removed the stream “less than two minutes after the violence started”.

In addition to mentioning the South Carolina church shooting, the gunman reportedly said he had been “inspired” by the gunman who killed 51 people in a New Zealand mosque in March 2019.

A semi-automatic weapon used in Saturday’s shooting also had a racial epithet written on its barrel, according to local daily The Buffalo News, citing a local official.

In a video call to True Bethel Baptist Church, New York Senator Charles Schumer called racism “the poison of America” and said: “We must tackle the scourge of gun violence and finally ban the weapons of war from our streets.”

But in the face of a strong pro-gun lobby, past efforts by the US Congress at tightening the nation’s gun laws have generally fallen short — even after horrific shootings.

The United States suffered 19,350 firearm homicides in 2020, up nearly 35 per cent compared to 2019, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in its latest data.