Buffalo shooting: Gunman drove 200 miles for 'pure evil' hate crime, investigators say

BUFFALO, N.Y. - Federal agents interviewed the parents of the teenager accused of shooting and killing 10 people at a Buffalo supermarket and served multiple search warrants, a law enforcement official told The Associated Press on Sunday.

Federal authorities were still working to confirm the authenticity of a 180-page manifesto that was posted online, which detailed the plot and identified Payton Gendron by name as the gunman, the official said. Authorities say the shooting was motivated by racial hatred.

Gendron’s parents were cooperating with investigators, the official said. The official was not authorized to discuss details of the investigation into the Saturday afternoon shooting publicly and spoke to AP on condition of anonymity.

A preliminary investigation found Gendron had repeatedly visited sites espousing white supremacist ideologies and race-based conspiracy theories and extensively researched the 2019 mosque shootings in Christchurch, New Zealand, and the man who killed dozens at a summer camp in Norway in 2011, the official said.

Gendron had traveled about 200 miles from his Conklin, New York, to Buffalo and that particular grocery store. Investigators believe Gendron had specifically researched the demographics of the population around the Tops Friendly Market and had been searching for communities with a high number of African American residents, the official said. The market is located in a predominantly Black neighborhood.

Police said Gendron shot, in total, 11 Black people and two white people Saturday in a rampage that the 18-year-old broadcast live before surrendering to authorities. Screenshots purporting to be from the Twitch broadcast 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.

"We pray for their families. But after we pray — after we get up off of our knees — we’ve got to demand change. We’ve got to demand justice," state Attorney General Letitia James said an emotional church service in Buffalo on Sunday morning. "This was domestic terrorism, plain and simple."

Among the dead was security guard Aaron Salter — a retired Buffalo police officer — who fired multiple shots at Gendron, Buffalo Police Commissioner Joseph Gramaglia said Saturday. A bullet hit the gunman's armor, but had no effect. Gendron then killed Salter, before hunting more victims.

Also killed was Ruth Whitfield, 86, the mother of retired Buffalo Fire Commissioner Garnell Whitfield.

Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown told churchgoers that he saw the former fire official at the shooting scene Saturday, looking for his mother.

"My mother had just gone to see my father, as she does every day, in the nursing home and stopped at the Tops to buy just a few groceries. And nobody has heard from her," Whitfield told the mayor then. She was confirmed as a victim later in the day, Brown said.

Katherine Massey, who had gone to the store to pick up some groceries, also was killed, according to the Buffalo News.

Erie County Sheriff John Garcia expressly called the shooting a hate crime.

"This was pure evil," Garcia said.

Twitch said in a statement that it ended Gendron’s transmission "less than two minutes after the violence started."

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Buffalo native, called for the tech industry to take responsibility for their role in propagation in an interview with ABC.

"The CEOs of those companies need to be held accountable and assure all of us that they’re taking every step humanly possible to be able to monitor this information. How these depraved ideas are fermenting on social media – it’s spreading like a virus now," she said, adding that a lack of oversight could lead to emulation.

The mass shooting further unsettled a nation wracked with racial tensions, gun violence and a spate of hate crimes. A day before, Dallas police had said they were investigating shootings in the city's Koreatown as hate crimes. The Buffalo attack came just a month after a shooting on a Brooklyn subway wounded 10 and just over a year after 10 were killed in a shooting at a Colorado supermarket.

Gendron, confronted by police in the store's vestibule, put a rifle to his neck but was convinced to drop it. He was arraigned later Saturday on a murder charge, appearing before a judge in a paper gown.

Buffalo police declined to comment on the purported manifesto that seemingly explicates the attacker’s racist, anti-immigrant and antisemitic beliefs, including a desire to drive all those not of European descent from the U.S. The document indicated he drew inspiration from the shooter who killed 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019.