A16 EZ SU THE WASHINGTON POST.SUNDAY, MAY 15 , 2022
is blown at everything that hap-
pened,” she said.
Samantha Faught, a spokes-
woman for the live-streaming
platform Twitch, said the g unman
began filming and sharing the at-
tack but the company removed
the stream two minutes after the
violence started.
People who know Gendron
were shocked by the news, de-
scribing him as normal if quiet.
Russell McNulty, a neighbor in
Conklin, said he last saw Gendron
at his high school graduation par-
ty a year ago. They smoked a
cigarette outside together and
talked about what the young man
wanted for his future.
“Oh my God, we were at the
graduation party,” McNulty
gasped after he learned what hap-
pened. “He seemed like a normal
guy.”
In t he streets around the super-
market, there was grief and rage
and disbelief. “Everybody is feel-
ing sad and angry about what
happened today,” said Robert
Nailor, 58, who has lived in the
neighborhood his entire life. “It
was a hate crime and it lets us
know how some people in the
world still think today.”
Cedric Holloway, a retired Buf-
falo police officer, was mentoring
a group of teenagers at a commu-
nity center two blocks away from
the supermarket when he began
receiving frantic text messages
about the s hooting. He quietly left
the room where the kids were
attending a workshop, made sure
the doors were locked and then
calmly explained to them why he
was turning out the lights.
The high-schoolers began
scouring social media, relaying ex-
cerpts of the document allegedly
written by the shooter to Hollo-
way. They also showed him a pho-
to circulating on the Internet of
the alleged gunman holding a mil-
itary-style firearm with some-
thing written on the barrel: The
n-word.
As he let his mentees go home
for the night, he checked in with
each one. “They told me not to
worry, ‘They’ve seen this stuff be-
fore,’ ” Holloway said. “How do
you respond to that?”Joly reported from Buffalo. Libby
March in Buffalo to this report, along
with Alice Crites, Razzan Nakhlawi,
Marisa Iati, Meryl Kornfield, Tim Bella
and Annie Gowen.wireless Internet network.
Braedyn Kephart, 20, an Erie
Community College student, said
she and her boyfriend, Shayne
Hill, also 20, pulled into the Tops
parking lot to pick up an Instacart
order Saturday afternoon when
they saw a young White man in
full m ilitary g arb s tanding outside
the store, pointing an assault rifle
at his chin.
“We looked over and saw him
standing there with the gun to his
chin, and I’m thinking, ‘Why does
this kid have a gun?’ Then I heard
screaming,” Kephart said. Police
told the couple to stay in the car
for their safety.
As Kephart and Hill watched
from their car, they could see the
suspect drop to his knees and
surrender to police, who took him
into custody. Other eyewitnesses
said he was laughing while he was
being arrested, she said.
“I’m pretty shaken up. My m indthe shooter entered the store, he
walked outside and placed the
gun under his chin as if he was
going to pull the trigger. Sur-
rounded by police, he instead
dropped the gun, removed h is bul-
letproof vest and knelt to the
ground, Lewis said.
“It was unbelievable,” he said. “ I
mean you might get robbed out
here, but people don’t really shoot
people out here.”
Philip Washington works at a
nearby barbershop and came out-
side when he heard gunshots. He
said he saw the shooter surrender
to police outside the store, and “it
was bodies laying everywhere
around him.” Washington said
that one of the women killed had
saved his cousin’s life.
Daniel Love, 24, the owner of
the barbershop, said that every
day for about a week, the suspect-
ed shooter would sit outside
Love’s s tore and pretend to use thethe store and said he saw a White
man outfitted for war, wearing
military-style fatigues and hold-
ing a firearm in his hands. He said
he couldn’t believe what was un-
folding before his eyes.
Lewis said the man opened fire,
pointing the gun left and right as
he indiscriminately shot people.
Lewis heard more than two dozen
shots as the man went inside the
grocery store, he said.
A worker who identified him-
self as Will G. told the Buffalo
News that he had walked into a
cooler to stock milk just minutes
before the shooting. As gunfire
rang out, he joined others who hid
in the cooler.
“I just heard shots. Shots and
shots and shots,” he t old the News.
“It sounded like things were fall-
ing over.”
He added, “I hid. I just hid. I
wasn’t going to leave that room.”
Lewis said that not long afterstore is in a lower-income area of
Buffalo and opened about seven
years ago, residents s aid. I t filled a
major gap, becoming the only su-
permarket within walking dis-
tance for many living nearby. On
Saturdays, locals said, it hums
with customers, including the el-
derly.
Saturday’s shooting echoes the
March 2021 mass shooting in
Boulder, C olo., in which 10 people,
including a police officer, were
killed at a King Soopers grocery
store.
Kathy Sautter, a spokeswoman
for Tops Friendly Markets, said
the company was “shocked and
deeply saddened by this senseless
act of violence.” She said Tops
appreciated the quick response by
law enforcement and was provid-
ing all available resources to assist
in the investigation.
Eyewitnesses described a scene
of terror. G rady Lewis was outsideFour of those killed were store
employees and six were custom-
ers, l aw e nforcement officials s aid.
Eric C ounty Sheriff John Garcia
called the attack “purely evil.”
Gendron grew up in Conklin, a
New York town more than 200
miles away from Buffalo near the
city of Binghamton. The gunman
was not known to law enforce-
ment, said John Flynn, the Erie
County district attorney. Flynn
said there were pieces of evidence
that indicate “racial a nimosity” o n
the part of the suspect, but he
declined to elaborate.
Investigators are reviewing a
screed that they suspect was post-
ed by the gunman describing his
white supremacist motivations
and ideology. The 180-page docu-
ment was uploaded to Google
Drive and details the author’s rad-
icalization on Internet forums, as
well as a plan to target a predomi-
nantly Black neighborhood.
The author calls himself a white
supremacist, fascist and antisem-
ite. T he document is centered on a
far-right theory that baselessly
posits that the White population
in Western countries is being re-
duced — or “replaced” — by immi-
grants in a deliberate plot.
The author cites Brenton Tar-
rant, the gunman who killed 51
people in a New Zealand mosque,
as an inspiration for the attack.
The author also mentions Dylann
Roof, who killed nine worshipers
in an attack on a Black church in
Charleston, S.C., in 2015.
Attorney General Merrick Gar-
land said the “senseless, horrific
shooting” is being i nvestigated “ as
a hate crime and an act of racially-
motivated violent extremism.” He
said the Justice Department is
“committed to conducting a thor-
ough and expeditious investiga-
tion i nto this s hooting and to seek-
ing justice for these innocent vic-
tims.”
Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown
said it was “a day of great pain for
our community.”
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul
(D), who is from the Buffalo area,
told reporters that the weapon
used in the shooting appeared to
have been legally obtained. “I’m
angry,” she said. “I’ve seen vio-
lence on the Brooklyn s ubway and
now in the streets of B uffalo. It h as
to stop.”
The Tops Friendly Markets
BUFFALO FROM A
10 killed in Buffalo supermarket attack; o∞cials call it racially motivated
LIBBY MARCH FOR THE WASHINGTON POST
People look toward the crime scene after a shooting at a supermarket in Buffalo on Saturday. Police said 13 people were shot, 10 fatally.
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