Supermarket shooter searched for black neighborhood, official says

THE 18-year-old white man who shot and killed 10 people at a Buffalo supermarket had investigated local demographics while searching for places with a high concentration of black residents, and arrived there at least a day in advance to conduct a reconnaissance, law enforcement officials said Sunday. Authorities said the gunman shot, in total, 11 black people and two white people Saturday in an uproar motivated by racial hatred that he broadcast live. This individual came here for the express purpose of taking as many black lives as he could,” Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown said at a news conference Sunday. The shooter, identified as Payton Gendron, had previously threatened to shoot at his high school last June, a law enforcement official told The Associated Press. Buffalo Police Commissioner Joseph Gramaglia said the then-17-year-old was taken for a mental health evaluation afterward. Meanwhile, federal authorities were still working to confirm the authenticity of a 180-page racist manifesto detailing the plot and identifying Gendron by name as the gunman, the law enforcement official told the AP. But the shooting, the latest act of mass violence in a country disrupted by racial tensions, gun violence and a recent spate of hate crimes, left local residents shattered. It also led New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Buffalo native, to demand that the tech industry take responsibility for its role in spreading hate speech. Hochul told ABC that the heads of tech companies “must be held accountable and assure us all that they are taking all humanly possible steps to be able to monitor this information.” How these depraved ideas are fermenting on social media, they are spreading like a virus now,” he said Sunday, adding that a lack of oversight could lead others to emulate the shooter.
Twitch said in a statement that it ended Gendron’s broadcast “less than two minutes after the violence began.” Screenshots purporting to be from the Twitch live stream appear to show a racial epithet scrawled on the rifle used in the attack, as well as the number 14, a likely reference to a white supremacist slogan. A preliminary investigation found that Gendron had repeatedly visited sites espousing white supremacist ideologies and race-based conspiracy theories and systematically investigated the 2019 mosque shootings in Christchurch, New Zealand, and the man who killed dozens at a summer camp in Norway in 2011, police said. An official who spoke on condition of anonymity told the AP. The manifesto published online and supposedly written by Gendron, described a racist ideology rooted in the belief that America should belong only to whites. All the others, the document said, were “replacements” that should be eliminated by force or terror. The attack was intended to intimidate all people who were not white or Christian and make them leave the country, he said. It wasn’t immediately clear why Gendron had traveled about 200 miles (320 kilometers) from his home in Conklin, New York, to Buffalo and that particular grocery store, but researchers believe Gendron had specifically investigated the demographics of the population around Tops Friendly Market. the official said. We recommend you read: The market is located in a predominantly black neighborhood. In a Sunday interview with ABC, Gramaglia said Gendron had been in town “at least the day before.” Ukrainian family crosses five countries to take refuge in the USA



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